Oh. My. God. I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated, I hated this novel (I can see why Ebert wrote a whole book devoted to films he hated, and yes, this opening was inspired by him)
I hated it so much, that at one point while reading it on the metro, I started hitting myself in the face with it out of sheer disgust. I feel sorry for the poor guy who was sitting across from me facing me, who I think was a bit worried that he was in a metro car with a crazy person. He wouldn’t be too far off. Pamela will make you crazy!
Where or where to begin? If you are fortunate enough to know nothing about Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, yet foolish enough to be willing to change that fact, here is a brief synopsis: Pamela is a young maid whose mistress dies; her son takes over the household, harasses Pamela, makes unwanted sexual advances, has a serious problem with the word no, and when Pamela wants to return home he instead takes her off to stay with this other servant and hold her prisoner. Then, he does an about face after reading her letters (because, hello, boundary issues) to her parents where she talks about how upsetting this all was for her (because, hello, sexual harassment and borderline sexual assault ain’t fun), and he apologizes and asks her to marry him. And Pamela says yes, and the rest of the novel is an ode to how awesome he is and how great Pamela’s life is now that she’s married to the guy who spent the first half of the novel as a sexual predator.
Now, you might be thinking, wow, if that’s virtue rewarded I think I’ll just go in for vice. I’ve got to hope that was the takeaway lesson here.
I do not think that portrayal equals endorsement, and I don’t think we can say that any portrayal of sexual violence helps normalize it. And I certainly believe that this type of harassment and these type of “solutions” or “positive outcomes” were common. And, yes, we cannot read this ahistorically.
But, I still hate Pamela and find it (and any argument that we shouldn’t find it problematic because of the historical context) loathsome. He is an abuser, end of story. Her saying, please leave me alone (or get the fuck away from me) should be enough for him to do it. The fact that marrying him is her great outcomes is so, so, so problematic. This is where portrayal becomes endorsement. Basically, the novel is saying, if guys are willing to marry girls, then they can harass them. If guys learn from their mistakes and realize, hey sexual assault is bad, then the girl who they were abusing will want to be with them and it will be great.
I guess that is where my issue really comes in, because I think this appears again and again in “romances; essentially, it’s the hard to get set up, or this belief that women should guard their sexuality, tell men no, but they don’t really mean it, they really want the guy, and he just needs to push past no and want to then commit and it will all be great. And I hate that romance trope, that stalker justifying, “yes she said no with her voice, but not with the way she was dressed” justifying; gah! I can’t even intelligently talk about this. It’s such an awful cultural trope and it is awful for men and women and heterosexual relationships and gender norms and; gah!
Look, when I say no or leave me alone or just ignore comments or street harassment, I jolly well mean leave me alone and I am not “asking” you to try harder thank you very much.
While we can’t read Pamela ahistorically, I think we can still hate the “love story” it tells; I don’t feel the need to find it progressive just because Pamela has a voice in the novel or because it upsets class norms.
We’ll take a nice long break before reading Clarissa. Yes, yes we will.
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