Throughout Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s repeated use of the word ‘creature’ has been linked to the novel’s preoccupation with class and status. The striking surplus usage of this singular image was deemed by Rhonda Fowler to be ‘neither coincidence nor linguistic negligence’, but ‘a motif which signals class subjugation’. The word ‘creature’ appears over 150 times within the text, interchangeably self-ascribed by Pamela (‘and I am a very unhappy young creature,’), and elsewhere directed as a derisory criticism of others: ‘[...] the wicked creature only laughed’. In both contexts, the word dehumanises its subject, creating a tension between Pamela’s self-conception and her oft-lauded virtue and sympathy. Her debased self-perception has internalised and perpetuated her social inferiority through a resort to animalistic nomenclature – but her same use of the word as a damning indictment of others is perhaps redolent more of an active scorn for many of her counterparts than a merely passive disillusionment.
If her self-configuration as ‘creature’ represents a self-loathing and reluctance to be associated with her class bracket, then her repeated use of the word to describe others is perhaps an externalisation of this frustration. Certainly, the novel implies that socio-economic barriers may be transcended by morality and virtue. However, Richardson’s portrayal of animals, initially observable in the ‘creatures’ which constitute the novel, is perhaps just as much a symptom of the newly changing influence of nature in literature as a class-based critique. Already the animal world in Pamela is more than a mere backdrop – as Pamela’s response to the bull, her descriptions of the dehumanised Mrs Jewkes and Monsieur Colbrand, and her final Edenic, naturalised domestic paradise will attest.
Visible in this work then, is the shifting literary conception of nature into the Romantic period, from nature as a passive, often religious mise-en-scene, to a fundamental force. The novel’s intensely introspective and personal register (emphasised by dint of its epistolary construction, almost suffocating in its interiority), will also become a Romantic literary trope; and the non-human aspects of the novel foment an undertone which supports and mirrors Pamela’s experiences. The animal world here is a mirror of the protagonist’s emotional state, and is more than conventional Georgian picturesque, albeit not yet granted the narrative influence it will receive from Richardson’s literary successors.
The novel's first instance of animalistic symbolism is introduced in the shape of the ‘nasty grim bull’ which affronts Pamela, its demonic ‘fiery saucer eyes’ convincing the protagonist of the conspiracy whereby ‘every thing, man, woman, and beast, is in a plot against your poor Pamela’. As she becomes increasingly fearful of Mr B’s advances, the bull becomes an objective correlative of her anxiety, and she relates a hallucinatory episode, attesting to the ‘double witchcraft’ of a bull chase which never happens. She explicitly coalesces the human and animal; finding the ‘spirit of my master in one bull, and Mrs. Jewkes’s in the other’. Ashamed of her excessive fear, Pamela retrospectively patronises herself, spurning her ‘fool[ish]’ flightiness and jumpy freneticism, but the sheer time devoted to her relation of the anecdote speaks to the event’s sheer ‘terror’ and ‘great effect upon [her] fears’. Indeed, her perhaps inordinate reaction to the threat of the animals is an externalisation of her fear of Mr B; Pamela’s reportage of his assault in the summerhouse is infused with the same dreamlike and hallucinatory language as that which characterises her rendition of the bulls’ fictitious charge: she is ‘benumbed with terror’, ‘sunk down [...] not myself’, ‘void of strength’.
Pamela is struck down with a nightmarish inertia during Mr B’s assaults, but her encounter with the bulls – possibly thanks to her subconscious awareness of their lesser and fabricated threat – allows her to realise the very escape she forfeits in the human version of the hunt: she ‘ran back to the door, as swift as if [she] flew’. John Pierce credits Pamela’s experience with the bulls to her ‘sincere heart’ and ‘measure of truth’. But although their identity is later revealed as the less ominous ‘two poor cows, a grazing’, her early fear is a more personal truth than a ‘verifiable description of the object world’ – it divulges her sexual fear of Mr B, and allows her to play out an escape scenario which is unattainable in the human world. Through Richardson’s use of the animal threat as a modified mirror of Mr B’s sexual threat, the reader receives a holistic impression of Pamela’s utterly pervasive fear and disquiet. Despite the incident’s fictionalised and inaccurate representation, Richardson’s hyperbolic representation of human experience through an encounter with the animal – a metaphorical extension of Mr B’s unfettered, uncivilised and ‘bullish’ aggression – sees nature existing as an revealing projection of human feeling. Later, Pamela will explicitly draw the link between male aggression and its attenuated counterpart in animals: ‘bulls, and bears, and lions, and tigers, and, what is worse, false, treacherous, deceitful men’, as animals become not only a symbol of the threat of male violence, but a powerful agent of self knowledge. Pamela’s response to the bulls illuminates the extent of her fear, adding experiential evidence to her verbal assertions, and the overspill of her fear outside her meticulously written letters introduces an active verisimilitude to her otherwise only rhetorical, written feeling.
The image of the bull reoccurs upon Pamela’s introduction of Monsieur Colbrand, the animal again serving as a vector for the protagonist’s fear and apprehension of her male captor. She directly compares him to the bull in a disdainful simile: ‘he has great staring eyes, like the bull’s’, and loses any semblance of humanity as her description continues; clad in ‘large whiskers’, ‘vast jaw-bones sticking out’, ‘blubber lips’, ‘long yellow teeth’, and endowed with monstrous proportions – ‘a giant’. A similar predilection for trenchant aesthetic description is present in Pamela’s startlingly physical appraisal of Mrs Jewkes; alongside Pamela’s diatribe of insults (‘broad, squat, pursy, fat’), she questions the extent to which the ‘wretch’ is human: ‘if any thing human can be so called’, and her portrayal of Mrs Jewkes’ ‘hoarse, man-like voice’ [emphasis mine] and ‘deadly’ strength also paronomastically gesture towards the animal. Interestingly, Pamela emphasises the bushy eyebrows of both of these physically repulsive and animalistic characters; Mr Colbrand has ‘eyebrows hanging over his eyes’ and Mrs Jewkes’ ‘brows grow down over her eyes’ – perhaps a subconscious and implicit distrust is aroused in Pamela when unable to see the eyes of those she encounters. However, Pamela’s detailed physical portrayals of others through animalisation speak to her more general heightened awareness of physical appearance. Mrs Jeeves tells her early on that she ‘owe[s] some of [her] danger to [her] lovely appearance’, Pamela enjoys her ‘smartish appearance’ enhanced by ‘pretty’ ‘caps’, ‘a little straw-hat’ and ‘knit mittens’, and early on admits that Mr B is ‘a handsome fine gentleman!’ and ‘charmingly dressed’, enough to compel her to question his benevolence : ‘why can’t I hate him?’. Her interest in aesthetic appearance and apparently uncharacteristic degree of vanity suggest that the protagonist is not as frustratingly, passively as perfect a character as she will have the reader believe – Richardson steers the narrative and uses her parent’s letters to expose a truth which Pamela learns by degrees: that ‘the outward appearance was nothing’.
However, her avowal to ‘always mistrust most when appearances look fairest’ perhaps demonstrates a lingering lack of maturity. Mrs Jewkes’ character reveals glimpses of ‘virtuous’ and ‘pious’ potential, one of Colbrand’s ‘deadly fierce looks’ helps Pamela to escape (albeit a gratitude subtly snubbed: ‘the only time, I thought, it ever became him’), and Mr B, although reformed, is physically sullied by ‘his vices’. Richardson thus complicates the Georgian conception of a congruity between inner and outer beauty; as the newly benevolent Mr B insists to Pamela’s father: ‘ I wish I had as good a habit inwardly as you’. In doing so, he exposes one of Pamela’s faults: a judgemental aesthetic snobbery which clouds her judgements of others’ virtue and innocence. Because Mr B’s assaults are closely associated with Pamela’s physical beauty, an uneasy dialectic emerges through the suggestion that Pamela has ‘earnt’ or merited B’s advances; as Mrs Jewkes asks: ‘is it not natural for a gentleman to love a pretty woman? And suppose he can obtain his desires, is that so bad as cutting her throat?’. Pamela’s sensitivity to appearance, and her snobbish dehumanisation of physically unattractive characters will also be taken up in subsequent Romantic literature. Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein will notably forsake his creature on the basis of aestheticism – his ‘monstrous image’, ‘gigantic’, ‘hideous’ ‘black lips’ and ‘ghastly grin’ intensely reminiscent of Pamela’s disgusted appraisal of Mr Colbrand’s ‘monstrous’, ‘giant’, ‘hideous’, ‘blubber lips’, and ‘hideous grin’. Frankenstein will mirror Richardson’s repeated, amalgamating portrayal of both humans and animals as ‘creatures’, similarly dealing with the ‘society and sympathy of [our] fellow creatures’.
The remaining ‘creatures’ that constitute the novel also offer insight into Richardson’s interest in appearance, and ultimately configure the natural world as an externalised, parallel narrative to Pamela's human plot. The novel's animal world becomes a quixotic, spiritualised projection of human interiority. When the reformed Mr B describes Pamela’s captors as ‘insolent creatures’ and within a line addresses her as a ‘sweet creature’ he demonstrates the uneasy, patronising and obscure collocations of the repeated word, equating two divergent poles of human civility (Lady Davers’ and Pamela’s) under a dehumanising umbrella-term. Pamela is earlier forced into a dehumanising realm, her longing to be ‘heard’ by Mr B ‘concerning that wicked woman’s [Mrs Jewkes’] usage of me’ is unheeded, and the scene sees her swiftly devolved of humanity. Mr B condemns her duplicity (‘as slippery as an eel’), and Pamela assumes the animal qualities attributed to her, internalising and further compounding her own oppression: she likens the tribunal she faces to that of ‘the poor sheep in the fable’ who is tried before the ‘vulture’ and ‘wolf’. Mr B responds with a shift from his initial derision via animalisation into a mockery of sympathy: she is a ‘poor innocent lamb’.
The relentless invocation of animals through this scene is exacerbated by Richardson’s repeated use of ‘creature’: in short succession Mrs Jewkes is an ‘aggravated creature’, Pamela is scorned as a ‘meek, good creature’ and a ‘charming creature’ by Mr B, and Pamela bemoans her plight – a ‘poor creature worse beset’. As the characters descend into their most lowly and animalistic selves, the scene of human degradation and cruelty reaches its dramatic zenith, as Pamela responds with some of her most intense suffering yet, ‘sobb[ing] as if my heart would break’. However, Richardson’s later shepherding image transfigures Mr B’s mockery of the mild ‘lamb’-like Pamela; her father recites a psalm whose invocation of ‘pastures green’ and ‘safe[]’ and ‘pleasant’ reassurance, coupled with Pamela’s relish of her counterparts’ newfound ‘devotion and decency’ is a divine transmogrification. The base, animalistic and degraded humans have become spiritualised, in a mirror-image of Mr B’s own transformation, and endowed with religious benevolence. The ultimate consummation of the spiritualised animal is redolent in Pamela’s shift from ‘creature’ to creator, as she becomes a proxy nature goddess; in his laudatory poem, Mr B insists that ‘all nature blooms when you appear’ and ‘fade[s] and die[s]’ when she leaves. Her ‘master’ and husband insists that ‘flow’rs and women are allied’, as the human and non-human worlds, previously at nightmarish odds throughout the novel, coalesce in a symbiotic, ekphrastic explosion of nature’s ‘delight’. Richardson’s ultimate depiction of commensurate and harmonious natural, animal and human worlds proffer an Edenic, picturesque notion of harmony. The animal world’s unity is emblematic of narrative harmony, and Richardson exploits the miraculous transformation of Pamela’s animals (from debased and revolting to divine and romanticised), as a means to bolster the apparent providential rectitude of the novel’s conclusion – a ‘resolution’ starkly problematised and criticised today.
Richardson’s symbolic passage from a treatment of animals as a threat to a divine exuberance of ‘nature’s glory’ sees Pamela’s animals mirror the protagonist’s attitudes towards the human world; her fear of the bull divulges the truth of her terror of Mr B, and she projects animal traits onto her captors in a revealing instance of her sensitivity to aesthetic appearance. By Pamela’s denouement, her ‘unspeakable happiness’ is manifested in a roseate flourish of paradisiacal nature, as the novel’s ubiquitous ‘creatures’ – both human and animal – are revealed to ‘mutually adorn’ each other. Richardson’s treatment of the animal is prominent in its simultaneous scarcity and significance throughout Pamela, exemplifying the nugatory existence of nature in the early novel, a trend which would change over the Romantic period.
Yet Richardson does lay the groundwork for tropes of the Romantic novel; Pamela’s youthful innocence and innate benevolence are harbingers of Rousseau’s Emile, and the literary figure of the noble savage was existent prior to Pamela’s publication. Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein would mirror Pamela’s status as a ‘creature’, both characters alienated, socially-ostracised and self-denying. In this way, Pamela is perhaps a prototype for aspects of the Romantic literary self: an instinctually virtuous, uncorrupted and unworldly youth who becomes socialised through a series of painful, disillusionary events. However, unlike his literary descendants, Richardson lacked the radical inclination to commit Pamela to the fiery fate of Romantic martyrdom, instead relegating her to the apparently palliative and restorative social realm of marriage, in one final act of subjugation. Yet the groundwork remains, and Richardson’s introduction to the notion that the natural world can offer its human counterparts parallels, projections and echoes of our own behaviour, endows the animal with an influence and significance previously uncharted.
Extra Reading:
Barr, Rebecca Anne, ‘Richardsonian Fiction, Women’s Raillery, and Heteropessimist Humour’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 33.4 (2021), 531-5
Blewitt, David, ed. Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson. University of Toronto Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442678293.
Dussinger, John A., "Ciceronian Eloquence": The Politics of Virtue in Richardson's Pamela, accessed via: https://ecf.humanities.mcmaster.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2015/10/dussinger12_1.pdf
Heffernan, Julian Jiminez, ‘Pamela’s Hands: Political Intangibility and the Production of Manners’, NOVEL, 46.1 (2013), 26-49
Flint, Christopher, ‘The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)Order in Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded’, SEL, 29.3 (1989), 489-51
Kibbie, Ann Louise, ‘Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, ELH, 58.3 (1991), 561-77
Pierce, John B., ‘Pamela’s Textual Authority’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 7.2 (1995), 131-4
Roussel, Roy, ‘Reflections on the Letter: The Reconciliation of Distance and Presence in Pamela’, ELH, 41. (1974), 375-99
Schellenberg, Betty A., ‘Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela 2’, Passion and Virtue, accessed via: https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442678293-008
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