Pamela as Fetish: Masculine Anxiety in Henry Fielding's Shamela and James Parry's The True Anti-Pamela

Pamela as Fetish: Masculine Anxiety in Henry Fielding's Shamela and James Parry's The True Anti-Pamela TERRI NICKEL In a letter to Aaron Hill written in 1748, Samuel Richardson claimed that an author must appeal to public taste in order to succeed: "You would not, I am sure, wish to write to a future age only. ... I am of the opinion that it is necessary for a genius to accommodate itself to the mode and taste of the world it is cast into, since works published in this age must take root in it, to flourish in the next."1 Despite such practical disclaimers, Pamela's accommodation to its age, in effect its very popularity , discomforts its critics. In most readings, its status as an eighteenth-century bestseller—a novel which women supposedly held up in public parks as proof of their fashionable taste and which became a waxwork show and souvenir fan — has been best handled as a historical phenomenon, a kind of literary "curiosity" belonging to the scholarly (not critical) area classified as "Richardsoniana," which includes those texts, artifacts, or details deserving only the piece-work of specialists, those hacks who do the work that makes criticism possible. The responses to Pamela—the parodies, plays, and pamphlets—simply ornament the "true" or "original" text.2 In recent years, Pamela's popularity has been the focus of a growing interest in the rise of consumerism during the era, and Terry Eagleton's reading of Pamela in The Rape of Clarissa addresses the problem of commerce and circulation directly. Primarily an ideological text, Pamela 37 38 / NICKEL operates, according to Eagleton, as "less a 'novel' than a password or badge of allegiance," "a multimedia affair, stretching all the way from domestic commodities to public spectacles, instantly recodable from one cultural mode to the next."3 Readily transformed into a commodity, Pamela unsettles at least in part because of its tendency to be reduced to a mere fetish object — a fan, a wax figure, or a book conceived as fashionable accessory. As a result, the vogue for all things associated with Pamela can be readily assimilated to a Marxist reading of commodity fetishism and the rise of the early novel. Without discounting such readings, I wish to claim that in its capacity to transform the novel into a material commodity, the Pamela vogue also raises important questions about the role gender plays in the novel's consumption, most significantly because Pamela seems to provoke in its readers some recognition of their participation in fetishizing the work. The logic of substitution that characterizes the fetish may also be the most important feature of the responses to Richardson's first novel. By nature parasitic, each of the responses to Pamela attempts to displace Richardson's novel and to produce a supplemental reading that ultimately can stand in for the original work. While the Pamela vogue does, of course, reflect the increasingly consumerist nature of eighteenth-century society, a shift Eagleton describes as "feminizing," the relation of the fetish to more specific questions of gender as they emerge in the responses to Pamela remains. In his essay on "Fetishism," Freud describes how the fetish object is a substitute set up as a "memorial" to, and "protection" against, the threat of castration. In the narrative scheme that Freud sets up, the sight of female genitalia precipitates the construction of the fetish. And significantly, it is the "male human being" who develops an anxiety upon discovering a difference in gender, which forces him to allay that anxiety through the creation of a fetish as a substitute for the mother's missing phallus. Recent post-structural and post-Freudian theory has done much to trace the ways masculine identity and subjectivity are constructed against the representation of the feminine as lack or absence. Femininity thus conceived becomes an idea, a fetish perhaps, which stabilizes masculinity as the primary form of subjectivity.4 Not surprisingly, in a number of the responses to Pamela that were part of its vogue, the problem of the materiality of the work emerges as an explicit subject. Perhaps more surprising may be the frequent correlation in these works between such commodification...