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Fasick, Laura. "Sentiment, Authority, and the Female Body in the Novels of Samuel Richardson." Essays-in-Literature. Fall 1992, 19:2, 193-203.
Laura Fasick is concerned with the relationship between the attempt to split the female mind and body and authority. She argues that Richardson has constructed Pamela as a virtuous character whose body and soul move as one and that to deny the body inevitably diminishes female authority. One example from the novel that she cites is when Mr. B refuses to allow Pamela to breastfeed. By asserting domination over her body, Mr. B is attempting to control her. "Whereas Pamela in the first volume has opposed Mr. B's patriarchal power with a claim for her autonomous worth that relied on the dissolution of gender and class hierarchies, she now draws her authority from him. His stature as a model husband proves her excellence as a wife and thus her expertise as an advisor in domestic matters" (195). Fasick traces the development of the link between body and authority through both Pamela and Clarissa. She concludes by saying that to "accept a version of the body that strips it of moral meaning apparently entails an acceptance of a version of moral presence that upholds patriarchal norms" (201).
Flint, Christopher. "The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Summer 1989, 29:3, 489-513.
Christopher Flint begins this essay by noting that "Samuel Richardson, and by extension his art, perfectly embodied a bourgeois class that was consolidating its power, challenging aristocratic institutions of control, and transforming cultural as well as economic means of production" (489). Because of this cultural influence, Richardson has Pamela learn that her identity is based on two distinct modes of behavior: "one teaching the value of bourgeois industry, the other establishing her aristocratic behavior" (490). Having established these two premises, Flint explores the influence of family and class on Pamela. And in the end, Flint concludes that Pamela's reward is "a kind of self-annihilation, a willed penetration into the system that victimized her in the first place" (510). Richardson is able in the novel to both destroy and support the patriarchal order of the novel.
Folkenflik, Robert. "Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage,
and the Novel." Eighteenth Century Fiction. Apr 1993,
5:3, 253-68.
Folkenflik approaches Pamela as a view of "'social
and relative duties,' centering on the relation of self to others
and the tensions between social and religious roles" (253).
While tracing Pamela's identity as a servant first and foremost,
Folkenflik considers arguments from Ian Watt, Nancy Miller, and
Nancy Armstrong. Mr. B's concern with Pamela's letters and his
constant inquiry into them is "devoted to depriving Pamela
of her privacy and denying her right to selfhood" (261).
Folkenflik concludes his article with this relevant statement;
"Rather than representing the rise of female authority, Pamela
begins with the loss of female authority in the person of Mr.
B's mother, Pamela's employer and teacher, and it ends with Pamela
empowered as a mouthpiece for a reinscribed male authority, precisely
the relation she bears to her author as well. Mr. B remains her
'Master.' If Richarson portrays the growth to selfhood sympathetically
and celebrates the individuality of Pamela, he nevertheless suggests
powerfully that the good wife is in many ways the good servant"
(268).
Golden, Morris. "Public Context and Imagining Self in Pamela
and Shamela." ELH. Summer 1996, 53:2, 311-329.
In this essay, Morris Golden gives an interesting account of the
relationship of Samuel Richardson to the narrative of Pamela
and Shamela. He traces key historical events and figures
that bear a relationship and influence on the text. Golden states
that "at a time when retrospection on his own life might
help Richardson shape Pamela's story, and when the national situation
encouraged such a shape, ...Richardson's sense of what sort of
person he himself was, and the rise of a paragon servant girl
to power through marriage with a prepotent gentleman, [Golden]
is suggesting shifts and merges and reflects each other in the
novelist's imagination" (312). He argues that Pamela's struggles
are reflections of Richardson's own progress in life. This provides
interesting fodder for thought when considering that Richardson
chose a female heroine to represent his own struggle for self-hood
in a male dominated world.
Gwilliam, Tassie. "Pamela and the Duplicitous Body
of Femininity." Representations. Spring 1991, 34,
104-33.
Tassie Gwilliam deals with the very complicated issue of feminine
duplicity. The historical shift of the eighteenth-century from
overt misogyny toward the "Cult of the True Womanhood"
has been linked to "women's presumed loss of productive work
to an increase in leisure under capitalism, and thus to the new
status of women as 'consumers rather than contributors to the
household economy'" (104). Because of this ideological change,
the view of women began changing. Women now must embrace this
duplicity and behave in such a way as to provoke desire without
the intention of doing so. As Gwilliam concludes, "feminine
hypocrisy and duplicity are convenient fictions potentially covering
masculine identification with femininity" (107). Gwilliam
does an excellent job of exploring these issues in depth as they
relate directly to Samuel Richardson and to his novel, Pamela.
"In Pamela Richarson attempts to legitimize possible
means of self-display and self-exploration for women, while confronting
the compromise and contortion necessary for living within a system
that so strictly controls and limits women's possibilities"
(128).
Kibbie, Ann Louise. "Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure." ELH. Fall 1991, 58:3, 561-77.
In this essay, Ann Louise Kibbie deals with the relationship of
the female characters in both Pamela and Memoirs of
a Woman of Pleasure to the competing forms of property present
in both novels. She states that both novels are "concerned
with the tension between two ideas of female character, represented
by two versions of property: a narrative of currency, in which
personality is constructed on the protean model of money and plot
follows the pattern of serial exchanges in the world of marketplace;
and a sentimental narrative, in which character is ideally fixed
and constant--virtuous--and is sustained by the model of real
property or estate" (561). Pamela's focus on estate
as proof of the heroine's character, "the property that that
both confirms her notions of selfhood and serves as a material
representation of her inner worth" (562). Kibbie explains
Pamela's virtue in terms of Pamela's one claim to inalienable
an incorruptible property. For example, Kibbie examines Pamela's
virtue in its reference to being a "jewel." Once described
as such in the text, Pamela's virtue becomes commodified and is
placed into the context of the world of exchange. Kibbie continues
throughout her essay to explore the ways in which Pamela represents
different forms of property the ways she is used for exchange.
She concludes by saying that "Pamela remains a scene
of erotic exchange despite Richardson's attempts to remove his
heroine from the implications of the sexual marketplace"
(576).
Martin, Catherine Gimelli. "On the Persistence of Quest-Romance in the Romantic Genre: The Strange Case of Pamela." Poetics Today. Spring 1991, 12:1, 87-109.
Catherine Gimelli Martin analyzes Pamela using the model
developed by Vladimir Propp which defines the essential plot elements
which structure the primary quest novel or Quest-Romance. By tracing
the thirty-one elements and Pamela's similarity or difference
to them, Martin concludes that major deviation occurs in "several
important role changes and in the pattern of displaced or deferred
marriage, which balances the parallel pattern of displaced or
deferred rape" (104). Martin believes that Pamela retains
the passivity associated with the role of the bride, but at the
same time uses male discourse to present her self to the world.
Pamela inverts traditional gender norms by "transferring
female terms into male and male into female" (105).
Nelson, T.G.A. Children, Parents, and the Rise of the Novel. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1995.
T.G.A. Nelson explores the role of children in eighteenth-century
texts and in doing so provides a fascinating read of Pamela.
Instead of the common approach of Pamels as a servant girl who
ultimately marries her master, Nelson explores Pamela's character
as a daughter. He then analyzes in detail her relationship to
Mr. B and her own role as mother in the novel. This becomes especially
pertinent in considering Pamela's transfer from her parents to
Mr. B as a result of her marriage and how this "transfer
of property" is affected by Pamela's different roles.
Schellenberg, Betty A., "Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela, Part II." Eighteenth Century Fiction. October 1991, 4:1, 27-42.
Betty Schellenberg traces the development of Pamela through Richardson's
two volumes. In Pamela I, the heroine represents female
honor and its equalizing force in an unequal social structure,
but in Pamela II, the heroine must play out the dutiful
role of the wife, "the center of moral authority and interpretation
within the social structure" (30). Schellenberg argues that
while Volume I allows for mobility within the social structure
for Pamela as long as she is virtuous, Volume II is simply about
redirecting that power back in the domestic sphere of a socially
controlled male ordered society.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
In this classic text dealing with the emergence of the form of
the novel, Ian Watt explores the novel as a "mirror"
of class conflict rather than as a struggle in its own right to
seize hold of certain strategically powerful signs, symbols, and
practices. In writing on Pamela in chapter V, Watt wrote
of Richardson that "he wrote at a time when a variety of
economic and social changes, some of them temporary and local,
but most of them characteristic of modern English and American
civilization, were combining to make marriage much more important
for women than before, and at the same time much more difficult
to achieve" (137). Watt's exploration of Pamela focuses
on the struggle of Pamela to achieve a new social status through
her marriage to Mr. B and the economic implications of such a
quest and union.
Williams, Carolyn D. "Pamela and the Case of the Slandered Duchess." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Summer 1989, 29:3, 515-533.
The question of a woman's ability to move up socially through
marriage versus a man's is what Carolyn Williams explores in this
essay. She discusses Mr. B's reference in Pamela to the
marriage of Edward Hyde into the royal family. A discussion of
the implications of such marriages must include exploration of
the unequality of the sexes in the structure of society. According
to Williams, Richardson believed that "every marriage ought
to be, to a certain extent, unequal, being a partnership between
a man and a woman, with the man as senior partner" (531).