Good Reader, Bad Reader, Good Pamela, Bad Pamela

The lumpy, uneven, evolving shape of Richardson’s text(s) has drawn disparate reactions from critics. Leah Price writes that Richardson’s “sententious passages which pepper the novel itself are designed less (through their content) to inculcate specific moral lessons than (through their structure) to regulate the pace of reading…The Collection [of moral sentiments] teaches patience with boredom”(21-22). On the other hand, Janine Barchas points to the interstitial components—the white spaces within and between Pamela’s letters, the fleuron in the middle of letters in Clarissa—as the places where, in Genette’s terms, the story takes place while the narrative breaks off; sometimes the reader is instructed to use that space for reflection on narrative action. Suppose they are both right—in which case, both critics have identified different remedies to the same problem or anxiety: the moral ambiguity of printed text. In one instance, Richardson would be fortifying the moral value of his text by fine-tuning the content, in the other, Richardson would be directing the reader away from his own printed text for the purpose of moral reflection. The second remedy brings our attention back to the idea of printed text as a suspect medium, and undermines the effect of the first. These conflicted and conflicting modes of disciplining the reader brings us back to the second volume of Pamela, in which Pamela relates Mr. B’s “commandments” in her letters, and where Stephanie points out, “beneath the 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.” The conflicts hidden behind the moralizing text remind me of the possible anxieties concealed by conspicuous choices concerning text and typography, and add a new layer of complication when considering Pamela’s inheritance form conduct literature.