Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Sexuality and the Morally Didactic Novel :: Pamela Virtue Rewarded Essays

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Sexuality and the Morally didactical NovelWe have difficulties as a modern audience appreciating the kindly anxieties mull overed in Pamela, especially those surrounding morality and valuation of individuals within the cordial framework. The radical stance of even using phrases such as law and fortune to denote Pamelas virginity are themselves loaded with a questioning of the brotherly stratification in which she resides. The term Fortune is perhaps the most playful but problematic. In it the issue of the commodification of Pamelas virginity is implicated, while at the same time gaining its authority within the framework of the novel through a Protestant ethic of infixed individual worth apart from social stratification. Complicating this issue of commodification is the range of bolshy or Weberian readings of the novel that place it within a conflict mingled with the working and aristocratic classes. Pamela is unmistakablely placing value in her protestant ethic rather than her social standing, it being more pride to her that she come of such honest parents, than if she had been innate(p) a lady (Pamela 48) and in the same letter looking slightingly on her fellow servants. My analysis will take as primal the moral issues in Pamela, but this is done with a cognizance that how we reflect on Pamelas morality is also closely related to how we read the economical and social aspects of the novel. There have been many works written in receipt to Pamela, some attacking the eroticism of the novel and others the social deconstructionism it implies however, the most emphatic is likely to be the Marquis de Sades literary response in Justine (1791) and Juliette (1797). As weve already seen in Fantomina, the erotic novel is not something new to the 18th century, and examples such as John Clelands Fanny pile (1748) provide explicit materials to demonstrate that the pornography and sadism of the day were as explicit as our o wn. As Shamela illustrates, this erotic aspect of Pamela cannot be overlooked, especially with the physicality of aspects of the letter writing and the readers view of Pamelas body through this. David Evans describes this as the prurience of its pre-occupation with come alive disguised as moral guidance, and the travesty of Christian morality convoluted in showing virtue rewarded to mean materially rewarded in this life, not spiritually in the next one.