I find I'm more easily able to connect with Richardson's language, which really doesn't come as a surprise to me, as Richardson's novel is certainly closer to what the contemporary reader would expect from a novel. What I'm finding very interesting as I read further into the book are the numerous contradictions that exist within it, which Watt touches on in his essay "Love and Novel."
Firstly, Watt's novel has some historical information about the change in the institution of marriage that I think is fairly essential for the reader to know in order to understand the impact that Pamela had on its readers. (Incidentally, when asked why he hadn't married his companion of several decades and the mother of his children, Gene Simmons of Kiss said that "marriage is a lovely institution, but you have to be crazy to be in an institution.") As Watts points out, the concept of "marriage" as we think of it today-the severing of family ties as the conjugal tie attains primacy-had developed not long before. Watts traces the development of courtly love, or "love" as an activity to while away boredom, into the idea of the modern marital relationship. According to Watt, the development of the concept of romantic love is linked with the shift in perception of the family as an economic unit to the family as a relationship-based unit, which is how we see it today. Under English marriage laws, marriage could either be a way to attain economic stability but paradoxically also a way to destroy it, depending on the economic state of the woman prior to marriage. For the wealthy, marrying meant delivering all of your property to your husband, but for the poor, the state of an unmarried woman was considered deplorable indeed. I think this paradox mirrors a lot of the contradictions in Pamela. For example, is Pamela wielding power over Mr. B? It would seem so-he's going to a lot of trouble on her account, and we all know that she gets him in the end. But Watt reminds the reader that for women actually in Pamela's situation who aren't privileged to be romantic characters, the potential for exploitation is very great indeed. So, we see Mr. B kidnap and imprison Pamela, smear her reputation to her family and neighbors, and terrorize her repeatedly, all actions that would be criminal today. And yet we're supposed to cheer, and Richardson's readers certainly did, when Pamela and Mr. B eventually get hitched. So, I have different and opposite reactions to the novel. The part of me reading it for entertainment certainly thinks its funny, even cute, but the part reading it conscientiously through a postmodern, feminist hermeneutic is appalled.
This is just a sidenote, but has anyone here read any works by China Mieville? He is an English anthropologist and journalist who started writing novels, and I think his writing inherits a lot from Defoe. His trilogy of Iron Council, Perdido Street Station, and The Scar all have that same preoccupation with location that Defoe's Journal does, in which the geography and city becomes almost another character.
Friday, February 16, 2007
Richardson's Love and Marriage, go together like-well, you know.
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1 comment:
Excellent post, Alana--your reading of Watt's argument makes a lot of sense, though it's also true that Richardson's text also "reminds the reader that for women actually in Pamela's situation who aren't privileged to be romantic characters, the potential for exploitation is very great indeed." After all, he takes care to have Pamela inform us that B is not only a landlord with many (loving) tenant farmers, but also a local JP (Justice of Peace) and a member of Parliament. I think that we should be appalled at the way B treats Pamela--but I also think that contemporary readers would have seen a lot more complexity in that relationship. Pamela is also something of a heroine--she stands up to B, though not in the way we would applaud; she interrupts many of her male guardians in order to put forth her own thoughts; she writes--and keeps everyone around her fascinated with her writing.
I also think it's important to keep in mind what Alana says about the modern marriage as one that tries to imagine itself as based on the privileging of interpersonal/heterosexual relationships. This is not to say, of course, that the economic logic is either distant or insignificant--but rather, that the economic seems to have been recoded, in some way, as the interpersonal. Notice all the moments in the text where Pamela describes her "virtue" in monetary terms? As a servant, she is in many ways his property....
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