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c h a p t e r t h r e e ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Interpreting the Woman Servant Pamela and Elizabeth Canning, 1740 to 1760 aaff Richardson’s Pamela is key to so many discussions of eighteenth-century British literary and cultural history that to position it as a text about domestic service initially seems an embarrassing oversimplification of a culturally, politically, and rhetorically complex text. To focus on Pamela’s status as a female domestic servant is also not new, as the novel’s connections to contemporaneous discussions of servants have been thoroughly commented upon,∞ nor has Pamela’s sexuality been ignored in this context. Scarlett Bowen, in particular, has pointed out how common assumptions about female domestics’ sexuality inform Richardson’s characterization of Pamela and her polar opposite, Mrs. Jewkes.≤ My contribution to the analyses of Pamela’s relation to eighteenth-century writing on domestic service is to read the titular character as a highly innovative and, hence, controversial intervention in representations of the woman servant’s sexuality from that period, and to situate that intervention within the historical emergence of modern domestic femininity. Richardson places his morally conscientious heroine in the context of servant literature’s prevalent characterization of women servants as either childlike, passive victims or, if they exercise their economic agency, as predatory whores, a set of meanings that, as Michael McKeon suggestively mentions , makes the female servant key to understanding the dynamics between private and public, or the individual and the social, for most of the century.≥ Richardson navigates around the popular images of the female domestic that were encountered in chapter 2. Instead of the passively ‘‘good’’ servant who eschews economic agency and may or may not escape sexual victimization, or the entrepreneurial whore who controls and debases her masters, Richardson creates 48 d o m e s t i c a f fa i r s a tale of female moral agency in which the servant woman carefully articulates her financial status within the hierarchies of class and gender, only to find herself sexualized in spite of her intentions. Richardson brings his heroine up against the question of how the female domestic’s ability to make both financial and sexual choices can take material form without sliding into prostitution, a condition envisioned by Defoe and other writers on ‘‘the servant problem.’’ Pamela negotiates a new imaginative space in which the woman servant’s sexual magnetism guarantees social stability rather than threatening it. Richardson’s novel did not do away with the stereotypes of victim or whore; it created a third alternative, a new way of representing the woman servant as both an object of desire and a loving intimate, a sexual magnet and a family member. In doing so, it also created a new erotic between master and maid, a mix of desire and respect between individuals —if not as peers, at least as equal sharers—in a moral culture that crosses class and gender lines. It also created a problem in interpretation that is the focus of this chapter’s discussion of the ‘‘Pamela controversy’’ that ensued from the novel’s publication. Pamela’s participation in cross-cultural literacy is guaranteed by her morality, which is, in turn, subject to the contradictory meanings accruing to her status as a domestic servant. In Pamela, the character of the woman servant emerges as the key to a social order mobilized through domestic regulation. Writing is ultimately the means by which Pamela exerts material control without falling into the dangerous sexual entrepreneurship of Defoe’s ‘‘slippery’’ maids. Pamela’s letters transform her moral consciousness into a form of material agency that avoids the dangerous terrain of economic or sexual control. Literacy gives the female servant a legitimized, if limited, means of influence over her readers that steps around, rather than solves, the problem of her sexuality. By writing, Pamela both participates in the production of a moral culture shared by domestics and their employers and, concurrently, creates new channels of desire between master and woman servant. However, as Judith Frank’s astute reading of Fielding’s responses to Richardson suggests, Pamela’s powerful command over writing created a focus for both democratizing impulses and concurrent fears of class-leveling,∂ a tension that was to play out over the course of the century, as shall be seen in this chapter’s discussion of the Elizabeth Canning trial as well as in later chapters’ treatment of servants and education in the novel. Before her words work...

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