Wendy Jones, Cornell University
"We'll make a pretty story in Romance," says Mr. B. to Pamela, in Richardson's eponymous novel of 1740--perhaps the first novel to be written about sexual harassment in the workplace. Although the story concerns Mr. B.'s various attempts to rape or seduce Pamela, and her stratagems of resistance, Mr. B's statement reveals that the true subject of this novel is the meeting of minds rather than bodies. Mr. B. and Pamela both script their actions according to what Gerard Steen calls a "love scenario," enacting culturally familiar narratives (the seduced maiden, the Cinderella story, to name the most obvious). And while their desire is reciprocal (both want the happy ending), their creativity comes into play as they innovate on this basic narrative schema, each attempting to "write" the version of the story that will become reality. At stake in this battle of wits and narratives is the revision of identity itself: for Pamela to become a fallen woman or Mr. B. a virtuous husband involves a change in orientation and perception so essential that it amounts to recreation of the self.
This paradigm for change relies on cognitive processes, that is, on altering learned behavior by further learning. Indeed, Richardson's avowed, didactic purpose in Pamela is "to inculcate Religion and Morality in so easy and agreeable a manner, as shall render them equally delightful and profitable"; readers of Pamela were expected to see that virtue has many rewards and therefore strive to follow her example. The novel self-reflexively models this process insofar as Mr. B. reads Pamela's letters and is persuaded of her goodness, which then inspires his reformation. But the narrative also undercuts this moral, for Mr. B's change of heart--his desire for a different kind of relationship and a different kind of love from the predatory stance that has characterized his intimate relationships in the past--points to a reorientation of thought that bypasses logic altogether. Mr. B.'s lessons are learned not in the neocortex but in the limbic brain, for they involve a rerouting of limbic attractors, those patterns of neuronal firing that determine one's emotional profile. Although Mr. B. steals and reads Pamela's letters all through her protracted ordeal, he "converts" only as a result of personal contact, which suggests an absorption of her pattern of limbic attractors that "gradually change him from who he was into who he is, one synapse at a time."
In Pamela, Richardson represents a truth about human nature, albeit one of which he himself was unaware. And by this I do not mean our old idea of human nature that ignores cultural difference by universalizing cultural specificity, but rather the nature that makes us human: our hardwiring as an interdependent species whose very physiology as well as psychology is inextricable from limbic resonance with others. Mr. B. shows that his therapeutic creation of a new self, one able to find emotional satisfaction in a relationship of reciprocal care, trust, and respect, depends on a kind of knowledge that predates our arrogant trust in the intellect to make us happy.
[W.J.]