Pamela's Textual Authority

Pamela's Textual Authority John B. Pierce Removed from her parents, harassed and imprisoned by her employer, nearly driven to suicide, Richardson's Pamela attempts to forge a personal identity that balances conflicting claims of authority.1 As the novel proceeds, Pamela tries to embody her parents' injunctions and to correct the abuses of aristocratic privilege by Mr B.2 Her maturing process culminates in a struggle between Mr B.'s will to power over Pamela and her will to profess and practise virtue. Unfortunately, the authority of Pamela's appeals to truth and virtue is threatened by her subordinated roles as adolescent, woman, and servant, roles which pose contradicting claims against a mature male aristocrat.3 Thus even though her moral stance may be justified by her belief in the correspondence between inward virtue and outward honesty, it is supported by little that is tangible in terms of age, sex, or social status. The only identity, the only authority, and the greatest degree of power she has are manifest in her writing, a textuality giving voice to an identity Mr B. would willingly debase and silence. A closer examination of the manner in which Pamela 1 John A. Dussinger, "What Pamela Knew: An Interpretation," Journal ofEnglish and Germanic Philology 69 (1970), 379. 2 Dussinger (p. 381) and Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) pp. 39-40, discuss the parents' role in shaping Pamela. See also Christopher Flint, "The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded," SEL 29 (1989), 497. 3 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1981), discusses Pamela's identity as part of the three subordinated groups of the adolescent, woman, and servant (p. 26). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 2, January 1995 132 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION invokes different texts—in particular, her own and those of scripture and fable—to strengthen her claims to truth and authority reveals the complexity of the character's and novel's textuality. Mr B.'s charges that she is fabricating a "romance"4 would take on some merit if she did not write truth, and she would become a temptress, a Lucretia, or a Shamela, manipulating a frustrated lover out of self-interest and caprice.5 Essentially, Pamela's text as a discourse of authority, as a virtually sacred record of events, manifests personal identity supplemented by sacred and secular texts, and reinforces her personalized claims to textual authority. Pamela's "Text" In an off-hand remark addressed to Mrs Jewkes during her imprisonment at Lincolnshire, Pamela talks in a "prattling Vein," offering what she calls "a little History of myself (p. 173). Pamela's claim that she creates a history follows in the tradition of eighteenth-century writers who seek to obtain a greater degree of credibility for their narratives by invoking an empirical bias to set against the idealizing impulse of romance. As Michael McKeon has pointed out, the generic and epistemological claims of the term "history" are intertwined with, and set in opposition to, those of "romance." Romance emerges in the period "as not only a distinct generic, but also as a broadly epistemological, category whose meaning is overwhelmingly trivialized or pejorative." History, on the other hand, becomes increasingly connected to empirical truth, "exploiting especially the techniques of authentication by first-hand and documentary witness." In McKeon's terms, Pamela is a "naive empiricist," a character refuting the fabrications of romance compiled by Mr B. in favour of "an empirical epistemology that derives from many sources." Pamela's sources include her first-hand observations, which are fixed, verified, and verifiable when she records them in written form. Borrowing from Elizabeth Eisenstein, McKeon outlines the argument that writing, but more particularly print, is connected to the development of the idea of objective history.6 Pamela's assertion that her story is a "history" gives authority to her account. What might seem personal and subjective becomes more general and objective when set against the structures of history. The possibility that her reports are distorted by emotionalism or unreliability...