Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth-Century England and Samuel Richardson's Pamela

Abstract

Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth-Century England and Samuel Richardson's Pamela JUDITH LAURENCE-ANDERSON For literary critics and many readers, a problem with England's first novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), has always been under­ standing how any sensitive, religious woman could possibly marry a man who has been constantly abusive to her, both verbally and physically, who has kidnapped her and held her prisoner, and who has even tried to rape her on two occasions. We have to wait for Clarissa (1747-48) to receive an acceptable moral answer. On a psy­ chological level, however, research into social history is steadily fur­ nishing us with increasing insights about how much the emotional lives of our ancestors differed from our own. These insights, I be­ lieve, go a long way toward explaining, if not justifying, the conduct of both Pamela and Mr. B. The new realization that domestics played a very important role in the social structure of the past,1 with as much as 40 percent of the population having been servants during adoles­ cence, further aids our understanding of this novel. By choosing a young female servant as his single correspondent, Richardson could contrast earlier, more brutal attitudes toward women, children, and domestics with the new desire for companionate love and the respect for individual rights which were emerging in England at this time. Richardson's psychological intuition, moreover, led him to dramatize 445 446 / LAURENCE-ANDERSON conflicts in sexual relationships which our society still has not fully resolved. For these reasons, Pamela records with psychological accu­ racy what it was like to be a young female domestic in the eighteenth century, and only when we fully understand the psychological ten­ sions her experiences would have created can we ask why any sen­ sitive, religious woman would marry a man who has tried to rape her twice. Apart from the novel's obvious fairy-tale ending, there are many problems involved in the transfer from literature to social history.2 No matter what amount of historical data is unearthed to get a glimpse of a real eighteenth-century Pamela, she still remains, after all, a lit­ erary character. With a novelist such as Richardson there are further problems; one must constantly explore not only what he deliberately set out to do, but also his unconscious intentions and his fantasy life.3 This enmeshes the reader in a whole network of assumptions not only about Richardson but about his readers in the past and his read­ ers today. In spite of these pitfalls, recent scholarly speculations about life in the eighteenth century are invaluable tools for the liter­ ary critic. Keeping in mind, therefore, that whatever I am going to say is problematic at best, I would like to hazard certain conjectures about changing emotional life in England in the eighteenth century and Richardson's Pamela. To begin, most critics agree that Pamela reflects the growing indi­ vidualism of eighteenth-century England. More recently, social his­ torians have claimed that major changes in the quality of family re­ lationships also occurred at this time, probably earlier in England than in other countries.4 Put very simply, their essential point is that love for one's spouse and one's children, as we think of it, has by no means been a histori­ cal absolute, but rather is a relatively new phenomenon in western culture, of the last two or three centuries. Before that, as we have learned, individuals tended to diffuse their emotional loyalties to a large group of relatives, kin, and neighbors rather than concentrate them on what is today called "the nuclear family."5 Put another way, persons before the eighteenth century usually would not permit themselves to become too emotionally attached to single individuals, since death was all too frequent, and necessary psychic health re­ quired horizontal rather than vertical investment of affections. This meant that if a spouse or child died, they could more easily be re­ placed in one's emotional life. In certain ways, this parallels the de­ scription by Bruno Bettelheim, in Children of the Dream, of what hap­ pens in the emotional life of children raised in kibbutzim. Instead...