Reconstructing the Gaze: Voyeurism in Richardson's Pamela

R econstructing the G aze: Voyeurism zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba in R ichardson's Pamela K R IS T IN A S T R A U B Samuel Richardson’s P am ela, or V irtue R ew arded (1740) has been accused of appealing to its audience’s voyeurism at least since Henry Fielding’s Sham ela was published in 1741. And readers ever since Field­ ing’s “Parson Tickletext” have with some embarrassment caught them­ selves in mid-peep as they gazed, entranced, at the spectacle of Pamela, “with all the pride of ornament cast off,” as Tickletext says. Fielding’s unselfconscious parson exposes a voyeuristic economy working in Richardson’s novel, an economy that makes a textual/sexual spectacle of the heroine and peeping Toms of both the hero and the reader. What Fielding’s parody reveals about Richardson’s text is that the story of an attempted seduction that evolves into a bourgeois ideal of marital love is, in material terms, a power struggle between gendered opponents in which the stakes are wealth and the sexual possession of the Other, the desired object. Squire Booby wants Shamela; Shamela wants Booby’s money and Parson Williams who, in turn, wants Shamela, but not at the cost of Booby’s patronage: a crude, material version of the games of desire, resistance, and possession played out in P am ela. What Fielding also suggests, through his gullible parson, is the reader’s unconscious involve­ ment in this struggle, his (or her) participation in the novel’s trajectory of desire: to possess the Other, sexually, materially—and literarily. Field­ ing’s “reading” of P am ela exposes a social/sexual dynamic in which see­ 419 420 / STRAUB ing and being seen are components in the characters’ struggle for power, and the means by which readers are seduced into accepting that struggle as “innocent,” exempt from material concerns of who possesses what or whom. Fielding lays bare a spectatorial complacency that the text of ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG P am ela encourages; what Fielding’s satire does not fully acknowledge, however, is the complex narrative strategy that makes complacent peepers of read­ ers more self-aware than the good Parson: this strategy, I shall argue, attempts to place the reader “above” any sleazy misperceptions of the heroine by exposing and debunking the process of voyeurism as it is depicted in the text. Richardson repeatedly calls attention to the activity of Pamela-watching through Pamela’s watching of Pamela-watching, the many instances, in her letters, in which Pamela comments on how others see her according to their own misogynistic assumptions about feminin­ ity. This “reflexivity,” the text’s calling attention to its own stagings of voyeuristic relations between Pamela and other characters, suggests that Richardson was not as unselfconscious about the ethics of voyeurism as Parson Tickletext. And his carefulness with managing how the reader sees Pamela would seem to have a context in contemporary thinking about the relation between subject and object, the spectator and the spectacle. The subject-object dichotomy of seventeenth-century psychol­ ogy brings into discourse an uneasiness about the moral implications of watching and the power relations between the one who watches and the one who is watched. A pleasure in observing others’ distresses might be explained in seventeenth-century theories of the spectator’s psychology by Hobbesian self-love, a pleasure in one’s own safety, or by fellowfeeling , pity for another’s distress. Descartes based either explanation, pity or pleasure in one’s own safety, on the difference between subject and object, self and other, a difference that necessarily involves an awareness of relative positions of power. “Those w ho are the m ost given to pity," for instance, as Descartes explains, are “Those who feel them­ selves very feeble and subject to the adversities of fortune . . . they represent the evil of others as possibly occurring to themselves; and then they are moved to pity more by the love that they bear to themselves than by that which they bear to others.”1 The spectator’s relative position of power determines, in part, the response to spectacle. This awareness of a power relation between observer and observed implicitly informs the...