“나의 미덕과 나의 의무가 허락하는 한”: 파멜라의 저항과 순종

Abstract

This article challenges the critical consensus that portrays Samuel Richardson’s eponymous heroine in Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) as a female subject seeking resistance and independence, and that also depicts Mrs. B as one obedient to patriarchal ideology, emphasizing the contradiction between resistant Pamela and obedient Mrs. B. This study revisits discourses for the reformation of manners in the 18th century England, which tried to convert women into morally empowered agents, and reads Richardson’s novel against the backdrop of the contemporary reformation discourses that produced a list of behaviors for women based on the principles of duty and domestic virtue. Through contextualized and nuanced reading of Samuel Richardson’s conduct books and Pamela, I argue that Richardson’s writings are intimately bound to the contemporary discourse of female reform that emphasized the duty of single and married women. In this light, Pamela’s resistance and submission to Mr. B can be reappraised as belonging to the same deontological ethics rather than inconsistent attitudes. To conclude, this study assesses Pamela, like Richardson’s other novels, as a work that investigates and depicts the potential tension between the various restraints imposed on eighteenth-century women.