After the Vows

The second volume of Pamela is an unusual text. The traditional comedy, as we all know, traces the trajectory of its protagonist from low to high, culminating in marriage at the apex -- then it's lights out, the end, and presumably the happy couple lives out the remainder of their days in everlasting and unwavering bliss. But has anyone ever wondered what happens in Act 6 of a Shakespearean comedy? Or how Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy get on at Pemberly after their pride and prejudice are supposedly quelled?

I can think of few examples of novels that take it upon themselves to investigate what happens once "I do's" have been exchanged, and perhaps with good reason. For a marriage is after all the composite of two separate individuals, and there are inevitably negotiations as each tries to understand his/her relation to the other and maintain autonomy. To delve frankly into these little maneuverings and manipulations might have the appearance of an affront to the sanctity of marriage. Yet, beneath the mask of propriety and didacticism, this jockeying for power is exactly what Richardson gives us in the second half of Pamela. Beneath all of Pamela and Mr. B.'s high-flown rhetoric lurks the persistent threat of verbal and physical violence, of resistance, of insurrection, the threat of two disparate subjectivities that will not, indeed cannot, be forged into one. We have only to look, for example, at Pamela's record of Mr. B.'s rules with her comments, an irrepressible subcurrent of individual will and consciousness, freely intermingled, her words breaking up and destabilizing his, enacting on the page the battle that husband and wife are waging under the cover of pleasantries and endearments.