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

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded - Sexuality and the Morally Didactic NovelWe have difficulties as a modern audience appreciating the well-disposed anxieties speculateed in Pamela, especially those surrounding morality and valuation of individuals within the social framework. The radical stance of even using phrases such as virtue and fortune to denote Pamelas virginity ar themselves loaded with a questioning of the social 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 with(predicate) a Protestant ethic of internal individual worth apart from social stratification. Complicating this issue of commodification is the range of Marxist or Weberian readings of the novel that place it within a conflict between the working and aristocratic classes. Pamela is explicitly placing v alue 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 born a lady (Pamela 48) and in the same letter looking disparagingly on her fellow servants. My analysis will take as central 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 economic and social aspects of the novel. There have been many works written in solvent to Pamela, some attacking the eroticism of the novel and others the social deconstruction 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 Hill (1748) provide explicit materials to exhibit that the pornography and sadism of the day were as explicit as our own. 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 sex disguised as moral guidance, and the travesty of Christian morality involved in showing virtue rewarded to mean materially rewarded in this life, not spiritually in the next one.