Pamela in Disguise; or, the Novel of Amorous Intrigue Appears Beneath its Overwriting

Pamela 's intertexts—the conduct-book guide tradition and the novel of amorous intrigue—lead in two utterly unacceptable directions for the action. The novels of amorous intrigue suggest the first bad result—that Pamela will be seduced into an affair with Mr. B. At the same time, the conduct book that Richardson interrupts writing in order to compose Pamela —the Familiar Letters —suggests a result that is no less unacceptable to successful narrative closure: that Pamela will see the threat of Mr. B.'s schemes and will return to her father's house.^[9] Such a result would obey the literal injunction of letter 2 of Pamela , as well as the advice tendered by a father in letter 138 of the Familiar Letters , that is immediately followed in letter 139 with his dutiful daughter's announcement that she has "this day left the house" and is returning home as instructed (165). In order to achieve a rewriting both of novels of amorous intrigue and of conduct discourse, within the new hybrid text of Pamela narrative action must steer its characters between the Scylla of virtuous withdrawal and the Charybdis of compliant seduction.

[9] According to Eaves and Kimpel, Richardson starts the Familiar Letters in September or October 1739, and interrupts them to write Pamela between November 10, 1739 and January 10, 1740 (Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson , 88–90). Presumably the preface to Aubin's Collected Novels dates from earlier in 1739 or even from 1738.

What takes Pamela and Mr. B. past the danger of an early short circuit of their story? Nothing within the text appears more crucial than the disguise scene, in which Pamela, the woman who claims not to have read novels, acts like a heroine from one by appearing incognito in her country dress. Here is the first episode of the novel in which Pamela becomes ambiguously complicit with the codes of love, disguise, and manipulation fundamental to the novels of amorous intrigue. Up to that scene, Pamela's story could have ended in virtuous withdrawal, but after that scene, in which Mr. B. wins a kiss from her, Mr. B.'s desire is triggered and he develops the Lincolnshire plot. But beyond its effect upon Mr. B., the scene offers a performance in excess of Pamela's intended meaning.

This disguise scene suggests how Richardson seeks to overwrite the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood. From the vantage point of his conscious project to elevate novel reading, such an overwriting means writing above and beyond them, toward higher cultural purposes. But overwriting the earlier novel involves a paradoxical double relation: the earlier novel becomes both an intertextual support and that which is to be superseded, that which is repeated as well as revised, invoked as it is effaced. Thus the elevation of novel reading is founded in an antagonistic, but never acknowledged, intertextual exchange with the earlier novel. This concept of overwriting offers the possibility of reading against the grain of earlier literary histories.

To interpret the unacknowledged exchanges working between a text like Pamela and the network of entertainments within which it circulates, it is necessary to reverse the procedures of the sort of literary history that goes back to earlier noncanonical texts to find the sources for canonical texts. Thus I am not reading the novels of Behn, Manley, and Haywood, or those of Penelope Aubin, Elizabeth Rowe, and Jane Barker, in hopes of finding the closest possible resemblance to the stories, characters, or ethos of Richardson's novel.^[10] Such an assemblage of single sources, supposed to operate as influences upon the author of the privileged text, fails to develop a general profile of those antithetical novels circulating as media culture for readers before 1740. Nor will I be focusing on the intertextual networks of explicit allusion subservient to the conscious intentions of the author evident, for example, in Fielding's announcement on the title page of Joseph Andrews that the "history" is written in "the manner of Cervantes."

[10] This kind of strategy is pursued most convincingly for Richardson's Pamela by McKillop (Samuel Richardson ) and Doody (Natural Passion ), in their chapters devoted to literary and cultural backgrounds of the novel.

To read the general cultural antagonism between Richardson and the novelists he hopes to displace, it is more fruitful to begin with the rather perverse question, "Where does one find a character who could not be more different from Pamela?" Although there are many plausible candidates, my choice is the erotically inventive central character of Eliza Haywood's Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725). By reading a scene of Richardson's novel alongside one of Eliza Haywood's, an alternative can be developed to conventional studies of the "influence" of one text or writer upon the author of another. Richardson does not have to have read Haywood, and even less does he have to allude to her, in order to have his text receive the shaping force of the "influenza" of her popularity.

The following is a summary of Fantomina's story: Fascinated with the erotic freedom of prostitutes at the theater, Fantomina exchanges her upperclass dress for the garb of these ladies. When she is approached by the charming Beauplaisir, one who has long admired her but has always been in awe of her reputation, she decides to follow the dictates of her own passion, and indulges his solicitations. Through a gradually escalating series of half-steps she loses her virtue and finds herself entangled in a secret affair with him. When his desire for her begins to languish she contrives an original solution: by changing her dress, hair color, accent, and manner, she transforms herself into a series of erotic objects to engage Beauplaisir's fascination: Celia, the "rude" "country lass" who serves as the maid in his guest house in Bath; Mrs. Bloomer, the charming widow in distress, who begs his assistance on the road back to London from Bath, and finally, that upperclass enchantress called Incognita, who carries him through an erotic encounter in her London apartments, while staying masked and anonymous. This chain of Fantomina's performances is brought to an abrupt and punitive close with the sudden return of Fantomina's mother, and the discovery that the heroine is pregnant.

If, as I am suggesting, Pamela incorporates and displaces many of the narrative and thematic elements found in Fantomina , near the end of Pamela's tenure as a servant in Mr. B.'s Bedfordshire estate there is a scene that provides one of Richardson's strongest grafts to the novels of amorous intrigue. This disguise scene is at once similar to and the opposite of parallel scenes in Haywood's novel. In preparation for her return to her father's modest home, Pamela has "tricked" herself out in "homespun" country clothes. This metamorphosis from the silks she had been wearing is so striking that the housekeeper, Mrs. Jervis, doesn't recognize Pamela when she appears in her new outfit. Mrs. Jervis prevails upon Pamela to be introduced anonymously to Mr. B., who calculatedly (Pamela thinks) uses the chance

to kiss her. Pamela narrates: "He came up to me, and took me by the Hand, and said, Whose pretty Maiden are you?—I dare say you are Pamela 's Sister, you are so like her. So neat, so clean, so pretty! . . . I would not be so free with your Sister , you may believe; but I must kiss you " (61). This provokes Pamela's emphatic assertion of her true identity. After her escape she is called back to receive Mr. B.'s accusation that she had changed her clothes by design, for, since he had recently resolved to give Pamela no more "notice," now "you must disguise yourself, to attract me." She offers this defense: "I have put on no Disguise. . . . I have been in Disguise indeed ever since my good Lady, your Mother, took me from my poor Parents" (62). After Pamela leaves the room, a servant overhears Mr. B. say, "By G———I will have her!" (64) As noted earlier, this disguise scene has decisive consequences: following it, Mr. B. becomes the active promoter of the novelistic coordinates of the action.^[11]

Pamela redirects the resources for fantasy and pleasure working in such a novel as Fantomina . In both stories the heroine's disguise functions in the same way—it stimulates a male desire that is in danger of fading, and carries the narrative forward to a new phase. Both a transformation of life and a romantic plasticity of the self are initiated by the heroine's artistry in changing her dress. By putting this empowering fantasy into practice, Fantomina can control the desire that would control her: by appearing as a succession of beautiful women, she fulfills an impossible male demand for variety; by tricking the male gaze that would fix her, she cures that gaze of its tendency to rove; by taking control of the whole mise-en-scène of the courtship scenario, Fantomina directs the spectacle of courtship that would subject her. In all these ways, Fantomina achieves a temporary reprieve from the courtship system described by Backscheider as a discursive system that positions women as subject to judgment, always in danger of becoming grotesque, and threatened with the loss of love (Backscheider, Spectacular Politics , 140–145). But the critique of courtship in Fantomina encounters its limit when Fantomina's mother investigates her pregnancy and closes down the spaces for erotic play by imposing harsh measures—a secret lying-in, and retirement to a convent.

Earlier in this study, I noted the instrumental advantages that accrue to Silvia and Roxana as a result of their recourse to disguise. Most crucially, it enables them to move through the social as a masquerade, maximizing

[11] Throughout this discussion, I am indebted to Tassie Gwilliam's argument that a recourse to disguise is a necessary element of Pamela and its reception. See Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson's Fictions of Gender , 31–36.

their pleasure and freedom, and temporarily eluding legal or moral constraints. Behn and Defoe also make metamorphosis effected through disguise fascinating in itself, a species of feminine magic. Today's women's magazines continue to underwrite the magic of the "makeover." By adding exercise, diet, and plastic surgery to the age-old resources of clothes and cosmetics, these magazines offer medico-scientific support to the notion that the most ordinary girl could be a Cinderella. In contrast to Roxana and Fantomina , in Pamela , Richardson incorporates an explicit critique of disguise. Thus, Pamela represents the heroine's makeover as a complex double movement: a descent in class signifies an elevation in virtue. However, from the moment Pamela tries on her outfit in her bedroom, her pleasure in her new appearance is presented in a risky and morally equivocal light: looking in "the Glass, as proud as any thing . . . I never lik'd myself so well in my Life" (60). Pamela's conduct-book self-assessment of her impending social decline ("O the Pleasure of descending with Ease, Innocence and Resignation!" [60]) is qualified by the way in which the scene echoes the narcissism of Eve looking in the pool in Milton's Paradise Lost , and of Belinda's "rites of pride" before her mirror in Pope's Rape of the Lock . Pamela's complicity in acquiescing to the masquerade staged by Mrs. Jervis—Pamela admits "it looks too free in me, and to him"—means she must submit to the kiss which she does not consciously seek. But what starts out as the naive frolicking of the teenage heroine, through the intensity of Mr. B.'s desire turns into the violence of his accusations. Instead of reading Pamela's change of clothes as a sign of virtuous resignation, Mr. B. reads it as evidence of her intriguing designs upon him. Pamela's defensive insistence that her new dress is her truest clothing, while her recent dress was a kind of disguise, does not ensure that her clothes can be read as reliable signs. Instead, her clothes and manner, just like her letter writing, appear as instruments for dressing across and between classes, and therefore carry an uncontrollable plurality of meanings.

How does Pamela find herself in the ethically risky position of masquerading as herself? In order for Pamela to function as an alternative to novels, Richardson seeks to produce the absorption ascribed to novels. To absorb his readers, Richardson has his heroine emulate the disguised heroines of the novels by performing her virtue before unreformed "readers" like her master. Pamela and Richardson, as composers of textual meaning, must therefore pull off the kind of performance of which Pamela's disguised appearance in her country dress offers more than an instance; her disguise in fact epitomizes the fundamental communicative posture of Richardson's text. In this scene, the novels of amorous intrigue take on a

life of their own in the text of Pamela , suggesting that they have not been fully assimilated to the elevated novel, but instead are incorporated in such a way as to circulate like parasitical foreign bodies within Pamela . Richardson's "new species of writing" becomes their host.

A certain errancy of communication is programmed into the disguise scene the moment Pamela allows herself to be introduced by Mrs. Jervis to Mr. B. as someone other than herself. Pamela's performance, by manipulating her appearance, produces an effect of disguise, and stimulates questions about the deeper meaning of this arresting spectacle. Thus the tendentious surmises that Mr. B. directs at Pamela: "I was resolved never to honour your Unworthiness, said he, with so much Notice again; and so you must disguise yourself, to attract me, and yet pretend, like an Hypocrite as you are—" (62). By interpreting Pamela's dress as a contrived disguise, he plots her into his novel. But his response results from at least two general aspects of her aestheticized self-presentation. First, because of the way in which a performance seems to be furnished for the spectator's gaze, it mobilizes the sense of being personally addressed. Second, because of the way in which disguise foregrounds the difference between what someone appears to be and what they actually are, it stirs spectator curiosity to know the face behind the mask. This curiosity may issue in fascination, anger, or desire—and Pamela's disguise provokes all three in Mr. B. His responses suggest that a disguised performance incites a wish to understand why the performer has chosen this particular performance out of all that might have been performed, in order to fathom the truth supposed to subsist behind disguise.

In developing a justification for her performance, Pamela finds herself caught up in an uncontrollable interplay between a performance space of surface appearances which bear a plurality of possible meanings and an inner space for the articulation of intended meanings claimed to be both temporally and ethically prior to the spaces of reception. The "disguise scene" suggests the impossibility of securing that interior place of original intention—her self as—radically prior to, and unaffected by, the plural social contexts for performance. In both letter writing and performance, meaning cannot be controlled from the position of the performer or letter writer. The wavering of meaning does not merely result from the vagaries of human psychology or the plurality of interests that could be ascribed to a reader. Both of these could be seen as extrinsic to an original intended meaning. Richardson's letter-novel and performances are not put at risk of misreading by something that comes along after writing and publication. Rather, there is something in the very structure of both the system of early modern entertainment wherein the letter-novel Pamela is composed and

circulates and the space that opens around Pamela's performance of her virtue that produces meanings that disrupt claims to an interior univocal meaning. In both letter writing and performance, a slippage necessarily will open between the initial mark or performance and its cultural articulation and social reception.

The detours of communications complicate that aspect of the disguise scene that offers the straightest line to the ethical conduct-book agenda of Richardson's novel—Pamela's presentation of self. When Pamela says, "O Sir, said I, I am Pamela , indeed I am: Indeed I am Pamela, her own self! " (61), the very repetition of the first-person pronoun, the double chiasmic assertion, the intensifiers "indeed, indeed," the emphasis and overemphasis of this circular enunciation of identity betray the difficulty of stabilizing identity. The precariousness of this incipient self, and the virtue ascribed to it, result from the fundamental features of the communication system within which both character and author function. Richardson's program for elevating novel reading is founded upon an instrumental subordination of envelope to letter, form to content, mask or surface to deep self. This program is committed to an idealization of the signified as the true meaning inside (that is, in the inmost recesses of the heart). Such a program depends upon a refusal to recognize that any communication that happens—whether "true" or "false," "deep" or "shallow," authorized or perverse, conscious or unconscious—is an effect of the whole communication system, with its series of differential relays. And because each relay modifies the sites and context of reading, it modifies the message sent along its network. There is no way to separate the initial mark, with its promise of identity and semantic closure, from its relation to something nonsemantic, the place(s) of its marking, as well as its relation to a series of other marks which can never be totalized or brought to a final destination.^[12] For this reason

[12] See Gasché, Tain of the Mirror , 217–223; in The Post Card , Jacques Derrida shows how the bipartite structure of the letter and envelope suggests what unsettles the communication ideal that the postal code attempts to institutionalize. Because of the numberless ways in which letters fail to arrive at their destination—from errors in address to the death of the addressee, from sloppy handwriting to the ineptitude of the carrier—any letter could end up in the "dead letter office." Because the possibility of errancy is built into the postal system, Derrida argues that this system exposes a necessary gap between an initial inscription of meaning and its final reading by the addressee. In composing an emission, the writer aspires to send the full meaning written into the letter to the addressee, so that it will be read properly, the way it was intended. But because its full meaning is never received as intended, because an excess of meanings crowd into every inscribed mark, because every re-location of a sign produces a certain minimal dis-location of meaning, the ideal of communicative transparency is shadowed by opacity, ambiguity, and deviation. Derrida formulates these insights into a "postal principle" said to subtend all communication—namely, "the letter never arrives at its proper destination."

there is no way to limit the plural and unexpected reserves of the mediaculture system for producing and disseminating meaning. It is precisely because it is set in motion by someone who strives so hard to get his message to its proper destination that the Pamela media event is an especially rich matrix for reading the perversely plural effects of communication.

It should be apparent that the three distinct forms of communication I have been discussing share a common dynamic. In order to be read properly, Pamela's letters, her disguise, and Richardson's letter-novel all must risk being misread. Thus, only by being read by the skeptical eye of Mr. B. can Pamela's detoured correspondence produce its truth effect; to become the heroine of an antinovel, Pamela must represent her virtue as if in disguise; to write an alternative to novels, Richardson must write the story of virtue's reward so it reads like a novel. In sum, to change novel reading, Pamela must travel the discourse network and reading practices of the media culture of the early novel of amorous intrigue (of seriality, entertainment, and absorptive reading), but for this very reason, the letter-novel may receive a kind of textual interference from the novels of amorous intrigue and lose its way. If this happens, Pamela 's account of the rewards of virtue may be read with the same skepticism Mr. B. directs at the heroine in the disguise scene.^[13]

[13] It will be useful to suggest how my reading of Pamela differs from Nancy Armstrong's. A short summary of Armstrong's thesis, put forward in Desire and Domestic Fiction , suggests why she does not view Richardson's novel as a site of dubious performance and ambiguous communication. For Armstrong, the invention of the "domestic woman" within the languages of the fiction and conduct books of the eighteenth century split the social world into masculine and feminine spheres of poetry and prose, politics and home, outside and inside, public and personal, state and family. This change focused desire and value so that the person's worth was internalized and psychologized. The invention of the modern subject gradually achieved cultural and social hegemony, and in so doing, occulted the political power that subject expressed. Armstrong places Pamela at the beginning of this momentous reconfiguration of subjectivity and politics. In the disguise scene, Armstrong finds that "Richardson creates a distinction between the Pamela Mr. B desires and the female who exists prior to becoming this object of desire" (116). "As it provides occasion for [Pamela] to resist Mr. B's attempts to possess her body, seduction becomes the means to dislocate female identity from the body and to define it as a metaphysical object" (116–117). The central turn of the plot—the displacement of Mr. B.'s desire from Pamela's body to her letters—defines her deep subjectivity as the locus of Mr. B.'s desire, while conferring upon a woman's writing the "power to reform the male of the dominant class" (120). I find two fundamental problems with this reading.

First, Armstrong fails to see the way in which the performative underpinnings of Pamela's virtue, and of Mr. B.'s reform, put in question the resolution of the mind/body dualism. Armstrong's reading stays close to the unctuous terms Mr. B. uses to celebrate his reform. "Sir, said Mr. Brooks , . . . You have a most accomplished Lady, I do assure you, as well in her Behaviour and Wit, as in her Person, call her what you please." "Why, my dear Friend, . . . I must tell you, That her Person made me her Lover; but her Mind made her my Wife" (389–390). By accepting the terms of Mr. B.'s reform, Armstrong countersigns the opposition between body and mind that Pamela's own performance has put in play, and Armstrong underestimates the extent to which Mr. B.'s act of reading and acceptance of Pamela's performance is itself a kind of writing. In challenging Armstrong, Gwilliam has argued that the "presumably beneficial change, and Armstrong's depiction of it, depend on the same metaphors—the body as surface and the soul or metaphysical self as depths— . . . that are used elsewhere to posit a disfiguring fault in the female subject. In fact, the finding of value in 'inner' qualities does not transform existing ideologies of femininity as much as it reinscribes them" (17). Gwilliam suggests how the body in Richardson and elsewhere continues to circulate as divided and complex. Similarly, in "Novel Panic," James Turner has argued that Pamela , against its avowed program, provokes strenuous efforts (in criticism, opera, and painting) to visualize and embody Pamela's body. In short, by crediting the idea that this sort of novel invents a new kind of subjectivity, Armstrong's reading of Pamela , like other rise of the novel readings of the text, thereby also extends too much credit to the claims made by Mr. B. (and Richardson) for Pamela's interiority, for her virtue, and for the novelty of her novelistic narrative.
The second problem with this reading, deeply indebted as it is to Foucault's account of the working of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish , is that Armstrong argues that Pamela's domestic subjectivity evolves out of surveillance—both by others and by her own self—that becomes internalized in her writing, especially after her abduction to the Lincolnshire estate. Armstrong's grand narrative of the middle-class invention of the domestic woman orients every aspect of the novel toward the "big" and abstract question of power. An evaluative and analytical hierarchy at work in Armstrong's text abstracts and simplifies the operation of letters, performance, and desire so as to subordinate them to power, the political, and class struggle. This hierarchy justifies postulating a transparent instrumental relationship between text, author, and potential readers. The invention of the desirable domestic self—as a "metaphysical object" that appears to go beyond the political—becomes Pamela's fictive task, Richardson's authorial strategy, and their decisive contribution to the transformation of culture. This critical narrative has the effect of making the culture and its texts a homogenized and totalized space, a perfectly efficient medium of communication, where the idea of the domestic woman, once produced, circulates freely and without significant resistance. The effective transparency of communication claimed by Armstrong for Pamela corresponds much more to what Richardson dreamed for his novel than to what he in fact effected.

Because Armstrong's reading spatializes the temporality of Pamela's narrative, she cannot take account of the way in which Richardson's novel is like both Pamela's letters and her performances: all are communication acts that can misfire, or fail to arrive at their proper destination. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Warner, "Social Power and the Eighteenth-Century Novel."