A Lumber-Room of Her Own: Attics in <em>Pamela</em> and <em>Jane Eyre</em>

Abstract

Before Jane Eyre's madwoman roamed attic and before subsequent connection between that space and female agency in Victorian fiction became established, Pamela can be argued to have performed in that site antecedent moment of female agency--and did so before novel was understood to be staked on marriage plot and domestic interiority. The attic--or lumber-room, (1) as it was called in early eighteenth century--made its first novelistic appearance as architectural space in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). But rather than debuting as a narrative space that reveals Pamela's inner thoughts, lumber-room resists internal focalization and instead takes reader outside narrative itself. Richardson's use of lumber-room, I argue, reveals author's figurative and spatial awareness that attic stands for something more than merely a descriptive place: it uncovers Richardson's prescient blueprint for building first marriage plot into genre that would later become domestic novel popularized by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Pamela's lumber-room creates a historical perspective that allows Richardson tacitly to acknowledge all unused but nonetheless stored literary lumber that went into his novel: amatory, seduction, and roman a clef narratives. The lumber-room itself eluded architectural description and definition in eighteenth-century, but largely represented a storehouse. This curious architectural site--a space that stores, changes, and records those very changes--allegorizes way Richardson tucks away leftover and latent legacies of earlier novelistic narratives into interiority of his domestic novel. Richardson's use of lumber-room in Pamela as a generic node anticipates Bronte's re-purposing of attic in Jane Eyre. I argue that Richardson and Bronte drew from same eighteenth-century pool of symbolic associations and deployed lumber-room as a symbolic space of storage, liminality, and transformation. For Richardson lumber-room marks moment before domestic novel was fully formed, and he uses it to establish his own vision of novel, which both acknowledges and dismisses earlier seduction narratives. But Bronte uses attic to disrupt Richardson's view and instead shows that novel is a dynamic and unstable genre. Several literary scholars have noted abundance of spatial descriptions in eighteenth-century novels, and in Pamela in particular. However, these scholars usually overlook significance of lumber-room and focus instead on closet. Robert Folkenflik in A Room of Pamela's, Own (1972) observes that Pamela includes extraordinary number of spatial locutions, one after other (586-7). But out of these many spaces, Folkenflik focuses on closet as one that signifies Pamela's textual agency. He argues, Mr. B's conversion is marked by shift in function of Pamela's closet. This becomes scene and touchstone of their formally changing relationship (591). He notes that by eighteenth century, closet was known to be a room off a bedroom or another one, which was characteristically used as [a] room[] for reading and (590-1). The fact that Pamela secures her epistolary agency at Lincolnshire--she reads and writer's her letters there--recommends closet as a defining site that authorizes her subjectivity. Michael McKeon in The Secret History of Domesticity (2006) refracts that argument through a reading of Pamela as a secret history and states that Richardson's novel discloses traditional or elite and creates an internalization of public concerns (470). Thus, he discusses Pamela's closets in terms of secrets and subjectivity: When Mrs. Jewkes spies her parcel of writing through Closet Keyhole, Pamela fears that her private Thoughts and Secrets will become known. The key to actual names has modulated to that opens into concrete inner recesses of mind (657) Folkenflik and McKeon both read abundance of closet passages and their attendant details (the keyhole and the off a bedroom) as indications of internal recesses of Pamela's thoughts. …