Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela Part II

Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela Part IIBetty A. Schellenberg In The Sense of an Ending Frank Kermode dismisses as "simple fictions " tiiose which do not speak of "dissonance, die word set against the word"; opposite diese he sets narratives which "continue to interest us" because they "move through time to an end," because "diey live in change, until, which is never, as and is are one." Realistic fictions, in otiier words, portray the aspiring individual in inevitable and sustained tension with his or her social environment. Accordingly, The Pilgrim's Progress, Pamela, Clarissa, and even Tom Jones should "continue to interest us," while Christiana's journey, the sequel to Pamela, Sir Charles Grandison, and Amelia can simply "go on to the dump with die other empty bottles" after the opium of their harmonious social circle has been consumed.1 Richardson's sequel to Pamela has provided an easy target for neat summaries such as that of T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel: "die great fault of die continuation of Pamela is that there was 1 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 179. Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957) has of course been very influential in associating the origins of the novel with individualistic and teleological concepts of the self in eighteenth-century England. While I believe that the resulting genealogy has limited our critical understanding of early fictions that resist the forces of change by portraying alternative social models, these conservative fictions ultimately confirm Watt's study in its identification of the individual-insociety issue as central to the eighteenth-century novel. In Pilgrim's Progress II, Pamela II, Sir Charles Grandison, and Amelia the dynamics of successful author, established audience, and preceding text combine to reinscribe the protagonist within a stable social circle modelled on the intimate conversational group. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 4, Number 1, October 1991 28 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION nothing which could happen in it, and the best excuse that can be offered for it is that Richardson was evidently forced to write it, without any urge from inside."2 In her recent examination of the sequel, Terry Castle discusses die novel's masquerade sequence as a "capsule of narrative delight in a narrative of few delights," a happy accident resulting from the coincidence of Richardson's and his reader's repressed desires for a repetition of Part Fs subversive, disorderly plot. Reading Part I as a narrative of carnivalesque desire fulfilled and Part II as imaginatively successful only inasmuch as it repeats Part Gs "sheer trasgressive energy," Castle applies to the novel a Bakhtinian version of the assumption that the essence of the genre is found in die individual radically subverting socially acceptable codes and discourses. She focuses upon the masquerade as "an indispensable plot-catalyst"; by its means "the novel, above all other genres, registered most symptomatically the paradoxical carnivalization of eighteenth-century society."3 Early British prose fiction, however, includes a significant number of texts which deliberately attempt to create a sociable, consensual, static structure for the "new species of writing."4 In her recent study, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke, Carol Kay argues tiiat to view me early eighteenth century as post-revolutionary is to perceive "social stability not as a given, but as a goal, ardently pursued and arduously maintained, by authors as well as by other authorities." She sees the status and audiority conferred upon an author through literary recognition represented in "die rise in status and authority of central characters from first novel to second novel." Richardson's work in general, she suggests, reflects his hope of "social reconciliation and unification ... invested in the authority of moral discourse."5 While Kay focuses on Clarissa as Richardson's response to Pamela Gs popular success, I contend that Part II of Pamela more expressly formalizes an exemplary model of social audiority as an alternative to the fictional structure patterned upon opposition between the individual and the group. 2 Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon...