The Columbia History of the British Novel

alternates with faux-genteel protestations ('so we talked a full Hour and a half about my Vartue'). Fielding continued this taunting in his first full-length novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), where Pamela's brother, a truly virtuous and beautiful serving-man, resists the seductions of his employee. Richardson- baiting is left behind as Joseph (kicked out from the household rather than locked in) wanders the roads with the quixotic Parson Adams, but the satire returns in the last volume, where marriage and -84- social climbing have turned Pamela into a cold-hearted snob, worse than those she encountered while a servant herself. Other negative tributes include (all from 1741) the anonymous Pamela Censured, James Parry's True Anti-Pamela, and Eliza Haywood's Anti-Pamela, or Feign'd Innocence Detected, the scandalous life of Syrena Tricksy. Soon there appeared a French translation of Haywood's novel (1743) and a separate French Antipamela, ou Mémoires de M. D. (1742).

Most notorious of these anti-Pamelas must be John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London, 1748–1749), whose lowborn heroine Fanny Hilldoes give in without a struggle to the first attractive young gentleman, does live the life of a 'London prostitute,' and yet achieves by rising in her profession exactly what Pamela achieves by abstaining: wealth, family, and respectable married bliss in a higher class. Early in the novel Fanny's friend Esther decides to take the Shamela route ('by preserving their VARTUE, some had taken so with their masters, that they had married them, and kept them coaches, and lived vastly grand'), but Fanny arrives at a similar conclusion without losing her sentimental ideals; she can sacrifice the pleasures of Vice to 'the delicate charms of VIRTUE' because she finds married sex with her true love even more intense than illicit copulation with her customers. Other critiques of Pamela also focus on sexuality. Pamela Censured picks out all the scenes where Mr. B. manhandles or leaps upon his servant, retells them as suggestively as possible, then protests that no young person could read them without being corrupted (girls will masturbate uncontrollably, boys will become intriguers and rapists, boasting that they would have succeeded where Mr. B. faltered). The letters of Shamela convert the same scenes into irresistibly lewd travesties, but the Fielding figure, Parson Oliver, adopts a more solemn approach: 'There are many lascivious Images' in Richardson's novel, 'very improper to be laid before the Youth of either Sex'; 'I cannot agree that my Daughter should… see the Girl lie on her Back, with one Arm round Mrs. Jewkes and the other round the Squire, naked in Bed, with his Hand on her Breasts, &c.' Richardsondoes create scenes like this, intensely sexual from the young man's perspective but horrifying from Pamela's; the buckish readers who see only the former, whether they leer or pretend to disapprove, see just half the story.

These frivolous and/or moralistic parodies help us grasp the significance of Richardson's original novel. They are often right about the -85- details, if wrong about what those mean for the integrity of the work. All the anti- Pamelists perceive, quite rightly, that Richardson has presented a divided heroine, torn apart by impulses that run counter to her strict and «Puritanical» morality-but they cannot give him credit for this perception. Seeing only the stock figure of the wily serving-wench, they cannot believe in those involuntary actions (trembling, hesitating, convulsing, fainting) that convince us of Pamela's psychological crisis; they assume that she must be fully conscious and calculating, trained in the 'arts of the Town'-the whorish stratagems of Shamela or Syrena Tricksy. The parodists are wrong to dismiss Richardson as a sly pornographer, and yet there is something voyeuristic about the desire to share the most intimate moments in an adolescent girl's first crisis, and to experience her feelings, not mediated by time and third-person narrative, but 'to the moment,' through the peephole. Pornographic mirror images of Pamela's career do remind us of an important truth-that official definitions of female «Virtue» focused obsessively and exclusively on the vagina, on what Shamela calls 'a poor Girl's little &c.'; Richardson merely insists that a poor girl's etc. could be as valuable (for society and for the novel) as a Countess's.

Conservative critics like Fielding were right to find something subversive in Richardson's Cinderella fantasy of social climbing, presented as an authentic social document; the «Instruction» conveyed by Pamela to servant- maids, Parson Oliver complains, is 'To look out for their Masters as sharp as they can,' so that 'if the Master is not a Fool, they will be debauched by him, and if he is a Fool, they will marry him.' (Fielding should be considered an expert on this catastrophe, since he himself married his servant-woman a few years later.) It is not simply the miscegenation of classes that Fielding finds unthinkable, but the destruction of a whole hierarchy of values: moral seriousness belongs exclusively to the gentry, so the sexuality of a servant-girl cannot be anything but a joke. Joseph Andrews puts these wenches in their proper place with the bawdy, lighthearted treatment of Betty at the inn (no romance names for her), who avoids pregnancy by receiving two lovers at once. Joseph's beloved Fanny seems to form an exception to Fielding's farcical treatment of the lower orders; she is at least taken seriously as a love object, though her subjectivity never occupies the reader (she cannot read or write). But Fanny turns out to be Pamela's long-lost sister, just as Joseph (like Tom Jones later) turns out to be a son of the upper classes, mysteriously mislaid when young, — 86- that the shortcomings of Mr. B. prompted Richardson to create a more formidable and expressive libertine, too dangerous to 'reform,' too violent to be salvaged by the sentimental compromises and conversions that wrap up Pamela. This suggests a revolutionary break between the two works. Richardson would later try to present his novels as a smooth, homogenous progression, a steady accumulation of moral truths, by publishing A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflexions, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. (It is just as well that Diderot did not read this attempt by the author to highlight the least impressive aspect of his work.) But when he was actually writing Clarissa, and defending his decision to push it to an uncompromisingly tragic conclusion, he understood how deeply he had broken from the earlier novel-a break inspired not by a moralizing program but by powerful artistic ambition. To soften Clarissa by reformation and happy ending would be to collude in the atrocities committed by Lovelace, to trivialize the heroine's suffering-and to repeat himself: 'What had I done more than I had done in Pamela?… What of extraordinary would there be in it?' He now dismisses the Pamela solution as «trite» and calls Mr. B. 'a lordly and imperious Husband, who hardly deserved her'-a sweeping condemnation that implicates Pamela in the delusion, for praising him so highly in public and in her prayers. When we draw up our list of anti-Pamelas, we must place Clarissa at its head.

Clarissa: Fiction, Drama, and Originality

Richardson clearly wanted to be seen as a literary original, an untutored genius closer to Nature than Art- indeed he exaggerated his own ignorance of literature to strengthen the claim that everything came from his own «extraordinary» creativity. (It seems appropriate that the poetcritic Edward Young chose Richardson as the addressee of his groundbreaking Conjectures on Original Composition, though Diderot may overstate the case when he equates the English novelist with Homer.) Like all major authors, however, he achieves this originality by transforming the themes, genres, and myths of earlier writing. We have already seen how Richardson borrows the name «Pamela» from Arcadian romance, how he combines the materials of comedy with the seri-87- ousness of spiritual autobiography, how he rewrites the Cinderella story as a detailed chronicle of social transformation-and we can still trace this fable in the cruel brother and ugly sister of Clarissa, though the Prince has now become the Big Bad Wolf. We should now examine his use of previous drama and 'Novel,' even though, paradoxically, these two main influences on his fiction filled him with disgust. In The Young Man's Pocket Companion he attacks the theater as a vile corruption, fit only for the idle gentry and hostile to 'People of Business and Trade,' who appear only as cuckolds and buffoons. The 'mere Novel' was even worse, a shallow and trivial form for 'Story-Lovers and AmusementSeekers'; Richardson presents his grand moral System 'in the humble guise of a Novel only by way of Accommodation to the Manners and Taste of an Age overwhelmed with a Torrent of Luxury, and abandoned to Sound and senselessness.' Yet he wrote his best work in what he called 'the Novel Kind'-at a length that only the leisured classes could read-and (as we shall see) drew extensively on the theater to create his compulsive and intense protagonists.

Richardson was not the first to narrate a scandalous seduction in letters written in the heat of the moment; Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister introduced this kind of novel to England in 1686. He certainly knew other epistolary sources like the (nonfictional) letters of Mme de Sévigné and the (fictional) letters of Ninon de L'Enclos, which he believed genuine. He was not the first to modernize romance by analyzing the emotional crises of the aristocracy at vast length, for the seventeenth-century novels of Mlle de Scudéry had done precisely this. Jane Barker and Elizabeth Rowe, in the early eighteenth century, had already tried to combine popular fiction with a religious and didactic purpose, and Defoe had already filled the novel with minute details taken from ordinary life. Nor was Richardson the first to make a single thwarted and obsessive love affair the center of the narrative; the author of Clarissa may not have known Prévost's Manon Lescaut (though Prévost himself translated Richardson's novels), but he had read a translation of Mme de Lafayette's