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Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. NY and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 127-173.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. NY: Oxford UP, 1987.
Barrett, Michele. "Althusser and the Concept of Ideology." In Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory. Ed. Lisa Appignanesi. ICA Documents. London: Free Association Books, 1989.
Beechey, Veronica, and James Donald, eds. Introduction. Subjectivity and Social Relations. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1985. ix-xvii.
Belsey, Catherine. "Constructing the Subject: deconstructing the text." Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991, 593-609.
In this article, Catherine Belsey suggests that recent trends in feminist criticism have allowed that "fiction too plays a part in the process of constructing subjectivity" (593). Her goal in this article is to work through how this process occurs. She begins by relating Louis Althusser's "Ideology and ideological state apparatuses" to literature. She concludes that "the argument is not only that literature represents the myths and imaginary versions of real social relationships which constitute ideology, but also that classic realist fiction, the dominant literary form on the nineteenth-century, and arguably the twentieth, 'interpellates' the reader, addresses itself to him or her directly, offering the reader a position from which the text is most 'obviously' intelligible, the position of the subject in (and of) ideology" (593). Belsey carefully works through several theoretical approaches to this relationship of literature/language to subjectivity, and concludes her article by saying that "the truth the stories tell is the truth about ideology, the truth which ideology represses, its own existence as ideology itself" (609).
Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Feminisms: An anthology of literary theory and criticism. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991, 334-349.
This article is included because it speaks to women writers who must "write themselves." Helene Cixous forcefully incites woman to reexamine their own motives and restraints. She states that "because the 'economy' of her drives is prodigious, she cannot fail, in seizing the occasion to speak, to transform directly and indirectly all systems of exchange based on masculine thrift" (339). Because of her examination of women writers, this text has interesting implications for Pamela when viewed in terms of a woman writing letters.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 1-30.
Ferguson, Frances. "Rape and the Rise of the Novel." Representations. Fall 1987, 20, 88-112.
Frances Ferguson does an excellent job of tracing the historical and legal maze surrounding the subject of rape. She then discusses Samuel Richardson's use of rape in the novels, Pamela and Clarissa: what she calls the "first full examples of the psychological novel" (98). Ferguson argues that "Pamela's marriage to Mr. B gives her the ability to reread his attempted rape of her as seduction, and her marriage also makes her virtue simply an instrument in the marriage campaign rather than an end in itself" (99). Ferguson sees rape as an example of the intersection of what is said in public and proved and what is said in private and believed.
Gilber, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale: Yale UP, 1979.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin this extensive analysis of nineteenth-century texts by generally concluding that a coherency existed among women who were writing fiction of this period that could only be explained by "a common, female impulse to struggle free from social and literary confinement through strategic redefinitions of self, art and society" (xii). They begin Part I of their book by asking, "Is a pen a metaphorical penis?" While this book does not deal directly with Pamela, it does begin to show how such writings of the eighteenth century began to manifest themselves both through women writers and the female characters they created. And as the authors note: "For the female artist the essential process of self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal definitions that intervene between herself and herself" (17).
Hartsock, Nancy C.M. Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1983.
Kaplan, Cora. "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism." Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 857-877.
Newton, Judith Lowder. "Power and the Ideology of 'Woman's Sphere.'" Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 765-780.
Perry, Ruth. Women, Letters, and the Novel. NY: Ams Press, 1980.
Ruth Perry attempts to explore the historical connection between women and the novel. She notes that "novels developed at a time when literate women were dispossessed of all meaningful activity save marrying and breeding, and when these activities were to be done only in socially acceptable patterns" (x). The myth of romantic love sought to strengthen economic imbalances between men and women and for this reason the form of the letter became quite popular. Closed out of the new expanding capitalism, women found a voice in first person writing: an example of which is seen in Richardson's Pamela. Perry explores in this text women's economic position and how women through eighteenth-century texts emerged as a "subject."
Schofield, Mary Anne. Masking and Unmasking the Female Mind: Disguising Romances in Feminine Fiction, 1713-1799. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990.
Mary Anne Schofield approaches eighteenth-century texts with an eye for the two-level rhetorical structure present and often ignored. She wants to unmask the masculine and feminine plots, both of which are present in eighteenth-century fiction. She considers the period from two perspectives, pre- and post-Richardson's Pamela. As Schofield observes, "the early work, 1713-1749, offers unsophisticated yet startlingly accurate contemporary attempts to anatomize the romance" (10). After Pamela, the next generation of female novelists "explore the romance form not only through plot manipulation and disguises, but through a more thorough critique of the genre itself" (10). While Schofield concentrates mainly on female novelists of the period, she does refer to the male "canon" novelists in order to thoroughly examine the emergence of the eighteenth-century female romance voice.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. NY: Columbia UP, 1985.
In this text, Eve Sedgwick argues that "concomitant changes in the structure of the continuum of male 'homosocial desire' were tightly, often causally bound up with the other more visible changes; that the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class; and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole" (1).
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. NY: Routledge Press, 1992.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. NY: Oxford UP, 1983.
Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth-Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Sidonie Smith analyzes the way in which histories of the subject, discourses of identity, cultural inscriptions of the body, and laws of genre coalesce in the autobiographical "I." In this book, she approaches these complex relationships by studying women's autobiographical practices spanning the first half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century. Underlying her analysis is the assumption that "the history of the universal subject underwrites a history of the female subject, for the architecture of the universal subject rests upon and supports the founding identifications of those that are the non-universal, the colorful, among whom is 'woman'" (11).
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Patricia Spacks writes concerning Richardson's Pamela the following related to her subjectivity within the novel: "'On the right side,' Pamela becomes a symbol of multiplication: of power. The manifest logic of the metaphor might suggest that she gains significance by her 'place,' but she finds it important to claim, rather, a new capacity to give signification. Such giving is specifically B's form of power--he has bestowed new meaning on his wife. Now Pamela claims corresponding capacity" (95).
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976.
Sussman, Charlotte. "'I Wonder Whether Poor Miss Sally Godfrey Be Living or Dead': The Married Woman and the Rise of the Novel." Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism. Spring 1990, 20:1, 88-102.
Charlotte Sussman discusses the more recent conclusion that Pamela is exemplary of the important socioeconomic changes of the eighteenth-century in England. Sussman deals specifically with Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 and Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel: both of whom agree on this analysis. Sussman carefully explores McKeon's and Armstrong's approaches to the sexual contract of society, the duplicity of body and soul, and the difference between marriage and seduction. Sussman concludes her article with an exploration of Erica Harth's essay, "The Virtue of Love: Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act." Sussman in examining each of these three texts believes that a reading of the rise of the novel is needed that "not only investigates those points of transition as points at which the economic, legal, and ideological machinery of culture comes to bear, in material ways, upon women's lives but also examines how images of this machinery are managed within the text" (101).
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angelica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. NY: Columbia UP, 1989.
Janet Todd frames this text with the broad subject of women's entry into literature as a profession between 1660 and 1800. In her opinion, the novel "expressed the self of the author as much as genres intended to be more strictly autobiographical, while the fictional influence is clear in the changing images of self delivered in vindications and memoirs" (6). Todd's discussion of the novel and its relationship to women's emerging identity deals with social, political, and economic aspects of culture. She discusses marriage in detail with specific references to Richardson's Pamela.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.