Blinded by Pamela

While reading Pamela, it made me crazy that I could never get outside of her worldview.  All of the letters we have are from her.  All of the narrative, her.  The portrayal of Mr. B, Mr. Williams, Mrs. Jewkes, Mrs. Jarvis—her.  This is especially frustrating when Mr. B and Mrs. Jewkes seem so convinced of Pamela’s disagreeable nature, and during Mr. B’s suspicion of another lover.  It makes one wonder if Pamela is telling her own story straight.  If she isn’t leaving certain things out.  But that is, I suppose, the power of the writer, and ultimately, why Mr. B is upset with her in the first place—he has the power to elevate her in marriage; she has the power to decimate him in print. 

Another thing that’s bothersome about the novel is that we never get to see the action as it’s happening.  Though it may seem like we’re voyeurs of Pamela’s near-suicide, or her emotional return to Mr. B, in reality, it happened days ago.  We’re simply reading it in a letter, written after the fact.  The Pamela we really see is the one right in front of our faces: the one recounting the stories, sitting at a table, with a pen and paper, and continuously, masterfully, letterwriting. Since we see none of the events actually happen to her, we can never quite be sure of their validity.  We must take her word for it—a word that is, throughout the course of the novel, challenged by Mr. B, Mrs. Jewkes, and even the trusty Mrs. Jarvis.

Certainly, the argument could be made that we are always receiving a story from a narrator’s perspective—never viewing the events except through their slant, and never really able to see behind their interpretations.  In this case, however, the narrator becomes the scope through which the reader accesses the story—the reader has no other choice.  In Pamela, however, we are actively aware that there are other sides of the story—other characters who see things differently than the narrator, and the narrator’s version of things is being constantly challenged.  In this novel, then, Pamela is not so much the scope through which the episodes can be seen, but the blind spot that must be navigated around in order to find the true story.

Of course, all of this wouldn’t bother me nearly so much if Pamela weren’t portrayed consistently throughout the novel as hopelessly passionate and impressionable.  First of all, she is fifteen, and though she has had a generous education from her Mistress, it is apparent in the novel that she lacks worldly experience.  Upon receipt of the letter from her mother, exhorting her to safeguard her virtue, Pamela is wary of Mr. B.  At first, she questions her mother’s interpretation; however, Mr. B’s actions in the summer house serve to validate her mother’s concern, and color her impression of Mr. B.  After this singular action from Mr. B, her mother’s worried letter becomes the prism through which she sees the remainder of the novel’s events.  She never again questions it.  Even when things are beginning to improve with Mr. B, and she receives an anonymous letter from a very suspicious gypsy, she still takes it at face value.  She never questions its truthfulness, never goes to Mr. B about it, never confronts the issue directly.  Not only is this simply irritating, but it also puts Pamela’s credibility as a narrator in question.  If she so easily latches on to one fear and never looks deeper (the fact that all of her fears were initially confirmed in Mr. B is really beside the point), how can she accurately and fairly portray all of the story’s characters.

But, that is precisely the point in Pamela.  The characters aren’t accurately and fairly portrayed, and the novel forces us (whether consciously or unconsciously) to come to terms with the stories we cannot read—the ones Pamela cannot tell.  We are blinded by Pamela’s story, and cannot see what’s behind it—the true events.  What is really being displayed in Pamela, then, is the act of writing itself, and a servant girl spinning a wonderful story. 

And then we remember that it was not a servant girl spinning.  It was a man.  And even if it had been a servant girl, it still would have been edited—first by herself, and then by a man.  So what we have in Pamela, is a novel with an intriguing story about social mobility and virtue, laid upon a secondary story about the physical act of writing, of editing, and finally, publishing one’s story to the world.  If the burgeoning of print allowed for an author’s upward mobility (if not with society at large, at least in certain individuals’ minds—which is all that is at stake in Pamela), how could one ever be sure that the story the author was telling was worthy of such mobility?  It is this question that seems to be plaguing Richardson’s novel, and perhaps this, if not an immorality in himself, that unconsciously casts suspicion upon her virtue, her motives, and her credibility as an author.