Abstract

Critics have read Mr B.’s failure to rape Pamela either as evidence of his sexual impotence and Richardson’s authorial incompetence or as a testament to the power of Pamela’s heroically resistant voice. In contrast, I argue that Mr B.’s inability to acquit himself as a rake is crucially linked to his desire to silence Pamela’s narrative. While he fails to penetrate her body, he ultimately succeeds at insinuating a competing narrative within her epistolary text—a narrative that highlights his own discursive powerlessness and depicts her writing as an act of sexualized boldness. Mr B.’s counter-narrative allows him both to redirect his erotic pursuit and to supplant Pamela’s story with his own. As his professions of weakness become his means of co-opting and reforming Pamela’s writing, Mr B.’s rhetorical tactics anticipate Richardson’s own strategic self-diminution as he publishes Pamela alongside—and in opposition to—female-authored romances.

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