"Thou Hast Made a Rake a Preacher": Beauty and the Beast in Richardson's Pamela

"Thou Hast Made a Rake a Preacher": Beauty and the Beast in Richardson's Pamela Arlene Fish Wilner Several years ago, the Disney film version of Beauty and the Beast was criticized for distorting the traditional emphasis on Beauty (Belle). Shifting audience attention from the female in the "original" story to the suffering of the enchanted prince, it encouraged sympathy for his plight and inspired hope that he could earn Belle's love through the acquisition of virtue, specifically the ability to love in return. Susan Jeffords has attributed this revision to a sociocultural shift in ideas of ideal manhood, as the "macho man" ofthe 1980s gave way to a growing respect and affection for "family values" during the years of the presidency of George Bush. Thus the Terminator became the Kindergarten Cop, his rough destructive and competitive edges softened by a growing sense of responsibility to hearth and home, wife and children: "The Beast is The New Man, the one who can transform himselffromthe hardened, muscle-bound, domineering man of the '80s into the considerate, loving and self-sacrificing man ofthe '90s. The Beast's external appearance is here more than a horrific guise that repels pretty women; but instead a burden, one that he must carry until he is set free, free to be the man he truly can be."1 For Jeffords, 1 Susan Jeffords, "The Curse of Masculinity: Disney's Beauty and the Beast" From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics ofFilm, Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynday Haas, and Laura Sells (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 170. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001 530 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION the focus on the Beast's problems, his need to be released to pursue a more satisfying and more authentic life, is yet another instance of the perpetuation of traditional power structures under the guise of a socially progressive "update" with an independent-minded Belle, who likes to read and has no time for the handsome but hollow hunk who causes other girls to swoon. In this scenario, it is only through the woman's agency that the burden can be lifted, and it is only by enabling the liberation of her man that she can find her own fulfilment. The salvation of the Beast/New Man "lies less with the men themselves than with those who must learn to look past the hard body to the loving interior (Robocop is more than a machine; John Kimball is not just a cop; the Terminator is not a killer; and so on) in order to achieve their own real happiness."2 Yet, while Jeffords charges Disney with having distorted elements of a traditional folktale to serve a late twentieth-century ideology that sneakily conserves traditional values while appearing to embrace new ones, in fact this "distortion" is itself part of a great historical tradition. While the film draws primarily on the French version of the story written by Mme Leprince de Beaumont (1756), Disney's Beast is curiously reminiscent of another character at the crossroads of cultural change, one who also embodies, at the beginning of the modern era, what Michael McKeon has called a "crisis of status inconsistency," the increasing tension between traditional and progressive theories of truth and virtue.3 This other "beast" character is Richardson's Mr B., the villain-turned-hero of Pamela (1740), a narrative that made a deep impression upon Mme de Beaumont. Discussions of Pamela inevitably involve the ways in which "virtue" comes to be defined in the narrative and the persuasiveness ofRichardson's claim that Pamela's behaviour is appropriately rewarded. Nevertheless, some of the most revealing criticism has suggested that the psychological and emotional awakening of Mr B. is central to the imaginative power of Pamela and to the distinctive brand of eighteenth-century class and gender politics that distinguishes its primary tension. Roy Roussel, for example, has argued persuasively that "Pamela is concerned not only with the development of Pamela's self but of B's as well. Its subject is the process 2 Jeffords, pp. 171-72. 3 Michael McKeon, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel," Modern Essays on...