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Article Excerpt
Although Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) continues to hold sway over critical accounts of the English novel, scholars have also argued that the influence of amatory fiction was not, in fact, silenced by Pamela's publication. Catherine Ingrassia, Patrick Spedding, and Kathryn King recently have suggested that the style and popularity of amatory authors such as Eliza Haywood continued at least into the 1750s. (1) The influential work of critics such as Nancy Armstrong, Michael McKeon, and William Warner has challenged Ian Watt's conception of realism in The Rise of the Novel, yet it still tends to leave Pamela at the center of the eighteenth-century literary tradition. (2) Critics such as Jane Spencer, Janet Todd, Ros Ballaster, and John Richetti, who have focused on amatory fiction, have done much to recover and reconsider Haywood's place in the context of the rise of the novel, but nonetheless see her as less important than Richardson, valuing her earlier work mostly for its political and cultural implications rather than its literary merit and influence. (3) It is worthwhile, though, to consider that while Pamela was different from amatory fiction, it was not necessarily more popular than other contemporary works. Pamela went through eight English editions in thirty-two years, and Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) appeared in nine editions in thirty-three years. (4) In this essay, I suggest that critical accounts of the "rise" of the novel look very different when Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless is placed at the center of the tradition of the eighteenth-century domestic novel along with Pamela. If Haywood's amatory novellas inform and shape Richardson's Pamela, as Warner argues, then Betsy Thoughtless re-appropriates the resourcefulness of the amatory heroine that Richardson used as a negative example of female behavior and incorporates it into her supposedly "reformed" rhetoric that had come to exemplify her prose style of the 1750s. (5) By reading both Pamela and Betsy Thoughtless in the context of Haywood's amatory fiction of the 1720s, Iargue that the struggle to appropriate the narrative of the sexually experienced woman reveals the dialogic complexities of the relationships between amatory and domestic fiction in the mid-eighteenth century. (6) Or to put it more succinctly, domestic fiction, rather than rejecting amatory modes--especially scenes of seduction and stories of fallen women--incorporates them to promote their comparatively conservative outcomes.
The importance of Pamela to understanding the domestic novel at large tests on Richardson's insistence that sexual virtue is paramount in realizing a coherent female identity. Haywood, however, provides an alternative construction of female subjectivity based on sexual desire and the ways in which the experiences of seduction, rape, and sexual intrigue shape rather than degrade women's experience. Reading Betsy Thoughtless in the context of Haywood's amatory novellas of the 1720s challenges Richardson's aesthetic and moral ideology of virtue. Betsy Thoughtless thus exemplifies the ways in which the mid-century novel incorporates both the amatory and domestic forms. (7) Betsy is herself a transitional character in the history of the novel. Possessing the daring and vain, if flawed, qualities of an amatory protagonist, she also has the characteristics of later, domestic heroines; she is eventually thoughtful, always generous, and always virtuous. Her task is to negotiate the dangers of potential amatory plots--and to explore her sexual desires--in order to attain subjectivity. By contrasting their heroines to characters who fail to learn the authorial lessons they promote, Richardson and Haywood offer radically different versions of the domestic narrative and the novelistic heroine. In this regard, Haywood's strength lies in her crafting several foils for the heroine--a method that showcases her successful techniques as an amatory author in the 1720s--in order to develop a subjectivity for Betsy that resists a Richardsonian ideology of passive virtue.
Haywood's amatory narratives do not consider seduction as an end point, but rather as the beginning of the heroine's history. (8) Resistance to illicit sexuality remains the stated goal of much of Haywood's early fiction and clearly the objective of her later writing, especially in The Female Spectator (1744-46). But Haywood also deals with the possibility that such restraint will prove ineffective. She not only offers strategies for life after seduction, but also proposes that the path from attraction to abandonment is complicated and offers many chances for redemption, provided the woman is smart enough to understand the situation and take advantage of its lessons. By re-appropriating Richardson's ideology of virtue, Haywood offers a domestic heroine in Betsy Thoughtless, who is an inheritor of her early amatory work. In their different uses of the tropes of amatory fiction, both Haywood and Richardson explore young women's responses to the threat of seduction in amatory subplots. This strategy allows their heroines (and the reader) to experience the titillation of seduction scenes and "learn" from the mistakes of fallen women without tarnishing their heroines' chances of marriage. By displacing actual tales of seduction onto foils, Richardson and Haywood appropriate amatory means for these domestic ends. My reading builds on Warner's thesis that Richardson "overwrites" the amatory form, or appropriates amatory tropes in order to use them for his rhetoric of virtue, resulting in cultural elevation. (9) While Warner's theory works in terms of Richardson's Pamela--especially through the key figure of Sally Godfrey, an example that Warner does not explore--it does not seem to work in quite the same way for Haywood's domestic fiction, notably Betsy Thoughtless. If Richardson appropriates Haywood's amatory style for his conception of virtue, Haywood goes a step further and re-appropriates Richardson's rhetoric to rewrite a domestic heroine whose subjectivity is not based on absolute virtue. In Haywood's amatory ideology, sexuality must be shaped and integrated into the self, creating a subjectivity based on the experience and understanding of sexual desire.
APPROPRIATING AMATORY FICTION
The history of Sally Godfrey--Pamela's predecessor in Mr. B's affections--is a plot lifted from amatory fiction. The climax of Pamela occurs in the middle of the novel; while the first half is concerned with the ways in which the heroine ardently resists and then eventually accepts Mr. B's sexual advances, the second hall has been referred to as a novelistic conduct book, both by Richardson himself as well as by modern critics such as Armstrong and Spencer. However, it is difficult to write a compelling narrative when the eighteenth-century conduct book is one's inspiration. Samuel Johnson's infamous remark about Clarissa could be applied to the second half of Pamela: if one reads it for the plot, one would hang oneself. But Richardson enlivens the narrative by including an account of Mr. B's cast off mistress, Sally. By delaying the story of Sally Godfrey until after Pamela has married Mr. B, Richardson underscores the importance of Pamela's maintaining her virginity. Critics, from Fielding and Haywood to the present day, have commented on the ways in which Pamela's refusal of Mr. B's addresses has an erotic effect, but Richardson was outraged by such readings. (10)
To argue that Pamela lacks sexual desire for Mr. B seems to challenge important readings of her subjectivity and significance, beginning with the anti-Pamelists in the 1740s and stretching into the influential twentieth-century work of critics such as McKeon and Margaret Doody. (11) Helene Moglen and Helen Thompson argue it is important to question the assumption that Pamela has an unconscious, an assumption that underlies all arguments regarding her virtuous subjectivity. (12) Richardson's anger at the erotic and manipulative readings of Pamela's desire by Fielding and Haywood, among others, demonstrates that he did hot want Pamela's character to be understood in a sexualized way. (13) The text seems to belie this at moments, especially when Pamela feels love for Mr. B that she does not understand: she rejoices he does not die in a hunting accident, she wonders at her inability to leave him when he sends her home from Lincolnshire. Such moments, however, emphasize a virtuous and wifely "love" rather than the eroticism or sexual desire that marks Sally's early obsessions with Mr. B. Nearly all scenes of physical intimacy between Mr. B and Pamela are tarnished by her intense fear of him. In an early seduction scene where Mr. B tries to rape Pamela, she writes: "I found his hand in my bosom; and when my fright let me know it, I was ready to die." (14) Repeatedly, Pamela connects sexual discovery with deathly fear. Her desire for Mr. B is defined by her proper wish--even when it is only implicit--to become his virtuous wife.
The resolution of the Godfrey plot shows Richardson's purpose in appropriating this story of fallen virtue; in essence, Richardson makes virtue erotic and overt sexuality undesirable by contrasting Pamela and Sally. Virtue becomes the normative reading for female attractiveness in subsequent domestic novels, despite amatory echoes in later fiction. (15) As much as Richardson claimed his book was an entirely new species of writing, he clearly understood the compelling qualifies of the cautionary tale of sexual misadventure and so included his own amatory plot in his moral narrative. Each time he introduces Sally in Pamela, the domestic narrative is interrupted by an amatory one. Sally, a character reared by greedy and unscrupulous guardians, becomes undesirable as a wife, though very desirable as a lover. Pamela is fascinated by Sally's story, constantly revisiting it in the midst of her domestic education in the second half of the book. What happens to Sally becomes an obsession for Pamela, though one rarely voiced out loud to Mr. B, because, as a proper wife, she should not do so. Mr. B's ease in seducing Sally and her subsequent pregnancy and exile echo as an alternate narrative that might have featured Pamela, had she not withstood Mr. B's frequent advances. (16) In contrast,...
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