Oh Pamela, I can see right through you....

Finally finally finally the time has come to read Shamela and see someone else's views of this lying, transparent little girl. I understand I may be being a bit harsh, but after reading almost 400 pages (I need to finish the book tomorrow morning...) of her horrible life as told through letters to her parents and her constant reminders of how absolutely perfect, virtuous, and moral she is (I always thought modesty was an aspect of morality...maybe I didn't have the same lessons as Pamela...), I am ready to punch her in the face for pretending to be something she's not, and Richardson for defending her to wits end. Henry Fielding is my new bff for sharing my thoughts on the little conniving brat.

I haven't quite finished reading Shamela, but when i got to this letter, I instantly fell in love.

LETTER II.

Shamela Andrews to Henrietta Maria Honora Andrews.

Dear Mamma,

[31] O what News, since I writ my last! the young Squire hath been here, and as sure as a Gun he hath taken a Fancy to me; Pamela, says he, (for so I am called here) you was a great Favourite of your late Mistress's; yes, an't please your Honour, says I; and I believe you deserved it, says he; thank your Honour for your good Opinion, says I; and then he took me by the Hand, and I pretended to be shy: Laud, says I, Sir, I hope you don't intend to be rude; no, says he, my Dear, and then he kissed me, 'till he took away my Breath — and I pretended to be Angry, and to get away, and then he kissed me again, and breathed very short, and looked very silly; and by Ill-Luck Mrs. Jervis came in, and had like to have spoiled Sport. — How troublesome is such Interruption! You shall hear now soon, for I shall not come away yet, so I rest,

Your affectionate Daughter,
Shamela.

This letter sums it all up for me. I love how Fielding points out that in all of these spots where she is "being virtuous," she is really pretending. Her exaggeration of each and every situation, her overemphasis of how "perfect" she is, and the fact that she is writing to her parents are all indications that Fielding has it right on here. All of her attempts to get away from her horrible master are sorry attempts, and all it took for her to want to be with him was for him to convince her that he loved her. I'm sorry, but if some guy was being awful to me and then said he loved me, that would not convince me to marry him. Also, with the exception of Mrs. Jervis (who really doesn't help her out that much anyways...), all the people she goes to for help are men. This may just be out of societal position and convenience based on sex, but one could speculate (as I mentioned on Thurs) that she is flaunting her good looks (since she is the most beautiful thing, even in her plain clothes) to get what she wants. And anything bad that ever happens to her or anyone else (she ruined A LOT of lives with her little schemes...I have the page numbers marked...I'll put them in later) is not her fault. Afterall, Shamela, errr, I mean Pamela, is perfect, right???? She would NEVER do anyone any harm........more on this later...

So I was thinking...

...about all this mention of virtue and being ruined and everything else that poor little Pamela is encountering in her little story, and i couldn't help but be reminded of Memoirs of a Geisha. Pamela puts so much emphasis on her virginity that it almost seems like a commodity. She mentions time and time again how all the men admire her because of her virtue, which is synonymous for her virginity. Even though she doesn't explicitly say it (she can't; she's writing to her parents) she is a tease, often flaunting her beauty and her clothes and using it to her advantage. Every man she encounters is described as being enthralled with her beauty, which I see as not wanting her beuaty, but wanting her virginity that she also flaunts.
I thought of Memoirs of a Geisha because Sayuri also is a poor girl and once she hits adolescence, her virginity becomes the thing that will either make or break her career as a geisha and allow her the means to escape her fate as a maid if she cannot pay off her debt. She sells her virginity for a very high amount, and through this wins the favor of Mother and secures her career as a successful geisha.
I'm sure there are other literary instances of this as well. Why is it that the poor girls in these two novels have to bank their life on their virginity to secure themselves in society? I haven't read that far into Pamela yet (about p150 or so as of right now) but the strong emphasis on her virtue and no wanting to be ruined makes me think that somehow her virginity may play an important role later on. Even if it is not as drastic as in Memoirs of a Geisha, the emphasis is still there and is commodified. I really don't know how to piece this together but have been thinking about it ever since I started reading Pamela. More on this once I read some more and can clarify the connection, if there even is one....

The Unreliable Pamela

As I mentioned in class on Thursday, Pamela was really irritating me for many valid reasons. I will explore each of these one by one, in explicit detail because as I read, I can't help but notice how horribly bad this book is pissing me off.....And thus my list of complaints begins....

1. Are we really supposed to believe this girl???
This first questions highlights the main underlying issue of all the other issues raised: Can we trust our information source? As I first started reading, I began thinking about the means in which the story is delivered, which is a series of letters from Pamela, mostly addressed to her parents (at least up to page 108). These letters are very problematic for a number of reasons.

First, Because they are letters from the "dutiful Daughter," to her parents, she has a very particular audience that she is appealing to. Because of this narrow scope, the reader has reason to assume that the information presented in the letters may be skewed, especially since her parents are very adamant about her moral and virtuous nature. She wouldn't want to ruin herself and disappoint her parents. Even if she strayed from her moral and virtuous nature, I find it very hard to believe that she would write about this to her parents.

Secondly, her letters read more like stories than reports of actual events. At the beginning of Letter XXX, Pamela starts the letter out hoping that she can deliver it to them in person and leave the next day (Thursday), but ends the letter saying that she has to stay there for another fortnight. This type of inconsistency signals that she is writing for entertainment purposes rather than just letting her parents know that she is doing just fine. On 77, Pamela mentoins that she will tell stories of her life at this manor as entertainment. Does this mean she's fabricating them a bit to make them more interesting or rewriting the story to fully entertain her parents with the idea of her virtuous nature? She is also often referred to a "scribbling woman," suggesting that she was a fictional story writer which is how her letters read. There is something about the tone of them that makes a reader wonder about their validity and question Pamela's account of events.

2. Someone's a little full of herself....

I started to count the number of times she called herself virtuous, reminded her parents of her virtuous nature, or something along those lines and lost count. It really started to get old. Then I started to think, damn this girl is a little full of herself. This supports her unreliability as a narrator because her letters become full of self-promotion and making herself look like her parents little virtuous princess. She also cites her beauty over and over and over again as well. She talks about how everyone admires her and makes it a point to bring up how important her virtue is to her and what lengths she will go to to protect it. She makes it seem like she is willing to give up a pretty comfortable and luxurious life in order to keep our virtue (which the reader finds out is not entirely true....great princess quote on 81 that I'll probably visit later). I would give page numbers, but I would probably end up citing the whole book thus far. She also consistantly reminds her parents in her letters to them on how much better off she is at her Master's home and points out her elevated status. The are multiple instance of this (p 76 is one I have off the top of my head). Even though she says she is not ashamed of her lowly past or the lowly state of her parents, she is not as wiling to go back to that lifestyle as she makes it seem (see 80-81).

3. Whose story do we believe?

Even within Pamela's own narrative in the letters to her parents, the stories of Pamela and her Master don't always match up. Pamela makes it a point to highlight her innocence and make the Master out to be a vile pig while she has no idea of his bad intentions and always seems to have these outstanding instances with hiding in closets and all sorts of other bizarre stuff (the closet hiding is a whole other issue...). According to Pamela, she is always the unsuspecting victim. The Master tells the story a little differently, pointing out her "wit and good sense" (83, 73), how she has damaged his name, and other things that show she is capable to know what is going on and may be telling the story a little differently to protect herself. She also often portarys herself as being a little firty and using her beauty in ways she's probably not mentioning to her parents (62, 63). Who's at fault here: Pamela or the Master? So far this is a little unclear.

More to come on this later..............

The Issues of Printing

In the beginning pages of Kernan's work, he expresses the anxieties that many people had in the 16th-18th centuries about the defamation of art and literature. There were many reasons for this as to why there was such a resistance to mass-produced printing. First, new mass-produced printing could allow the book to be distributed everywhere and anywhere, allowing people from all walks of life to enjoy literature. Second, in order to do so, this often meant translating books into the vernacular, changing their original form. This may seem like an really awesome thing at first, but the way I imagined it was like copying a painting. Paintings always seem to hold a higher value in our minds than literature, so this example helps to think how they were thinking (and our views of literature as not being "high art" may be a result of this time period and the mass production that made it available to all.) When somebody thinks of a painting, they usually always think of it in its original form and copies are thought of as just that, copies. The copies never hold as much value as the original and nobody wants a copy of a Picasso or Norman Rockwell piece. To make copies of this (even though it is done), is not thought of highly. This is the way that people thought of copying the Greek and Latin classics of the time. These were considered "high art," and to take them out of their original form through mass production was not accepted. This is like carrying around a credit card with VanGhogh's "Starry Starry Night" and acting like you really had a copy of it. This made something exclusive and turned it into common property. The book became commodified and democritized.

Another reason for this resistance that seems almost obvious is the standard resistance to cultural change. Any time things start to change in a society, there are always those who oppose it and do not want it to happen. The shift that was occuring, which we talked about extensively in relation to Addison and Steele, is the shift from an aristocracy to a more modern class system where people did not come to wealth only through family relations and marriages. More people had more money, the middle class was emerging, and a whole new literary culture was emerging, inviting a whole new arena of tastes and responses, all of which were not accepted with open arms. Literary cannons were no longer part of this aristocratic social structure and no longer served as part of the foundation as they once were. Once again, the mass production of the book changed the way people looked at literature and changed the way that literature was used as a marker of social status.

Printing and Property

At first I had a hard time trying to figure out how these essays went together. I should rephrase that....I have no idea how Locke's ideas fit in with the others that are obviously about print culture and the changes in law about printing. I was trying to figure out if it was just a general commentary about how things beginning to become less chaotic and monarch mandated. I thought that the Act of Anne was a way for the people to enter into a compact to bring printing up from nature and into the realm of reason and rationale. And then I realized we were supposed to only read Of Property...

So after re-reading Locke, I came to another conclusion. It seemed to me that the basis of Locke's argument was that if you do the work, the property is yours, except in those cases wen the property is common property and shared by all. This can apply to these things in two ways. First, in the case with the women in the printing house, since they were doing the work, it would only be natural for them to be recognized as the owners of the property that they were so heavily engaged with. Since they took ownership of the work, it should be theirs. The most important distinction here is that these women were not just working for a publisher, but they were involved with the actual running of the publishing business.

when it comes to publishing the written stuff, it seems like this could be interpreted in two different ways. On the on hand, when a writer writes something, he or she writes it for a public audience to read, share, think about, comment on, etc. In this case, the writing would be considered part of what Locke would call a common property and should not be regulated in any way, giving anyone the right to copy, distribute, and/or use the text in any way they feel is good and right and in the best interest of the common good. The Act of Anne does recognize this in a way and give power to the people to contest over-priced books which would conflict with the interest of the common good which was to promote the ideas of books and make them readily available to people.
On the other hand, there is a divide between rights by labor because even though the author wrote the book, the printer was the one distributing it, technically being able to take ownership for the distribution. However, from reading the Act of Anne it was not really clear if the act was in favor of the author or the bookseller. Maybe it was unclear because of the ambiguity of who does or should own a text once it goes into the printing stages. Hopefully we can clarify this a little bit because reading 18th Century acts alongside John Locke is not my cup of tea....

Here, due to the compact I have entered with my sovereign, Professor Maruca, is my February 17, 2009 post......did I mention how much I really dislike Locke and his sovereign compacts????

Poetry and Critics...

I found Swifts essay "Hints Towards an Essay in Conversation" quite humorous. He pointed out every characteristic of open conversation and spoke of its evil. What he didn't do, however, was give any advice as to how these faults and evils of conversations could be remedied. The only thing he does suggest is that having women present in conversation would help regulate the tongue. But he also says that if women have any usefulness in conversation, this would be it. He sees himself as a "True Critick," one who "is a collector and discoverer of writer's faults." If anything, Swift seems to be advocating that there need to be more critics to bring regulation to writing and speech. Even though he doesn't mention it, I'm sure Jonathan Swift was not fond of poetry either for its lofty ways and crooked speech. What I think is even funnier is that these "faults" of conversation are still present even after 300 years...Swift, your essay obviously didn't persuade anybody.

Speaking of poetry, I really dislike poetry as well and agree with the criticisms of it. I really think that poetry is an over the top way of writing that is overly showy and made much more complicated than it needs to be. People will sit there and tear apart lines of twisted words and come up with things that the author probably never intended. I would say that I agree with the Female Tattler's critique of poetry. I also think it is important to note that the argument on poetry parallels the argument about critics: ancient vs modern. Why is it that everything that is "old" seems to be so much better than that which is new? Is it because more people have been able to look at the old stuff with a more critical eye and there seems to be more to say about it or is it because people are always more critical about what is happening in the present moment? Any time there is change (which there is a lot of that going on during this time period), people begin to freak out and latch onto what is "normal" or "consistent," not realizing that these things evolved from previous forms as well. Maybe these essays are more critiques on change than anything else....


Anyways I'm just rambling now....back to a more focused approach...

In this section of essays, there was evidence of a very important debate that was going on about the role of the critic. In this section alone, there is a representation of both sides (Jonathan Swift vs Edward Ward). Swift sees the need for a critic that points out the faults of society to help uplift it from the evils of folly and vice that are running rampant through England at this time. Swift also sees this as the role of the critic throughout history. Ward sees the role of the critic much differently. He thinks the modern critic is overly negative, only pointing out the bad while not offering any sort of advice on it or providing helpful feedback like the ancient critics did. I have to say I agree with Ward here because Swift's essay could have been much more effective if he would have provided feedback as to how to conduct a proper conversation and what a proper conversation is rather than only what it is not. As Ward points out, this type of criticism is completely unhelpful and almost useless because it serves no purpose except to propagate negativity. This often seemed to be the problem in the excerpts from The Spectator and The Tattler. The articles often provided what was wrong with society, but offered no feedback as to what was right or how to fix it. Simply pointing out the problem and making people aware of it doesn't fix it. But at the same time, writing essays which simply "criticize" socity provide fuel for discussion in coffehouses and other forms of conversation, even if it is consistant with everything Swift said not to do....

Totally in need of a Tatler.....

I'm not quite finished with the readings, but Then I came across Tatler No.144, I couldn't help but chuckle....and then I started to really think about it in relation to our current day and age and how an article like this may do our society some good. There are definitely parallels between 18th century England that are relevant today (political corruption, obsessions with commodities, frivolous spending, need I go on????). Even though it is not always in the best interest to look at literature or other material of the times in a modern light, I feel that becuase the issues addressed in the Tatler and Spectator are so relavent to what is going on now, it may do us some good to understand the time better by looking at them in relation to our own.

In Tatler No.144, Isaac Bickerstaff writes about how Britain at the time needed a censor to keep frivilous spending in check, especially when it came to purchasing elaborate coaches. He comments about how these coaches wee ruining the roads for the luxury of the select few and were used as a means to bring attention to a select few. "As for my Part, I cannot but admire how Persons, conscious to themselves of no manner of Superiority above others, can out of mere Pride or Laziness expose themselves at this Rate to publick View, and put us all upon pronouncing those Three terrible Syllables, Who is that?" (56). He is critiquing the notion of celebritydom in 18th century England. He goes on to say how puchasing a highly decorated coach served no purpose except to make one stand out among everyone else and outwardly show one's wealth. This made me think of lavish cars, limosines, and celebrities. I also thought about how our magazines and newspapers do the complete opposite of what the Tatler and Spectator do and how there really are no popular news outlets that discourage this type of high consumerism (and if there are some out there, PLEASE let me know what they are! lol). I began to ponder the idea of how our society could use a publication like this that would motivate people to critique the corrupt and disfunctional society we live in (and also reinforced the notion that history repeats itself all too often). Thinking about it in this way makes these publications more relevant to us and helps us realize why they became so popular. These papers sought to provoke thought above and beyond the superficialness that seemed to saturate society at the time.

Going off in another direction, the aim of these papers also paralles what John Gay was attempting to do in The Beggars Opera. Both are working to highlight the common problems of the time, but the Tatler and Spectator take it a step further than Gay does. While Gay simply highlights the corruption and consumerism of his time, the Tatler and Spectator offer ideas to remedy these problems and point them out explicitly, rather than (sort of) implicitly like Gay does. The papers also provoked thought and discussion on these topics within the coffehouses, which The Beggar's Opera did, but probably not to the extent that the papers did (or maybe they were talked about in conjunction...wouldn't that be something....?)

I should probably finish my reading now...or go to bed...whichever happens first....