Legible Virtue

Is female virtue a quality of the body or a quality of the mind? This is one of the primary questions with which Richardson's Pamela is preoccupied.

The paranoia surrounding Pamela's virginal status, or lack thereof, results from the direct equation of female virtue with virginity. The problem with this equation, as represented in Pamela, at least, is not that it is sexist or reductive or unfair. Rather, the problem is the indeterminacy of female virginity. The unchaste maiden bears no mark upon her, no scarlet "A" announcing that she has irretrievably lost her virginity together with her virtue. She poses a threat to any man who would make her his wife, for upon entering the marriage contract his masculine virtue is not attendant on the intactness of his own virginity, but on hers. Female virginity thus precariously bears a double burden. The problem with equating female virtue with virginity, then, is the illegibility of the female body.

How can female virtue be made legible? In the eyes of Mr. B, Pamela's virtuousness remains doubtful despite her many rebuffs of his advances and her refusal to submit during his attempted violations of her body. Only upon perusing her journal, the record of her inner life, does Mr. B come to recognize her as virtuous; to rephrase this more provocatively, only by penetrating her thoughts via her writing is he able to believe that her body has not been similarly breached. Where, then, does female virtue reside?

One final thought: Mr. B's conversion into an honest gentleman under the purifying force of Pamela's journal is a kind of internal advertisement for the efficacy of the novel as a didactic tool. If Pamela's reflections can turn even so determined a rake into a model of fidelity, what can her story not effect in "the minds of the YOUTH of both sexes"?